Murray Chass may have retired from the New York Times in 2008, but that hasn’t stopped him from sharing his baseball opinions with people through his blog.
In a post on Thursday, he implored Baseball Hall of Fame voters to not reward managers of players who used performance enhancing drugs like Joe Torre and Tony LaRussa, while he seems to give Bobby Cox a free pass for whatever reason.
Chass argues that it creates a double standard to send the managers who benefitted from PED usage, but not the players.
And he’s right, but for all the wrong reasons.
It’s easy to see the main flaw of Chass’ argument – every manager in baseball had players on their team who did PEDs in the 90s and early 00s. Every single one of them.
Therefore, the best managers were the ones that got the best results – Torre, LaRussa, and Cox. So if you want to keep those guys out of the Hall of Fame, you have to keep every single manager from that era out.
The one thing that Chass actually is right about is the existence of a double standard when it comes to PEDs and the Hall of Fame.
The fact that there are people who will punish players who didn’t do anything just because they played in the 90s and hit some home runs is ludicrous.
Chass says in his article that he will never vote for Craig Biggio because he falls into the category of a player who
is “proved to have cheated, admitted they cheated or are strongly suspected of having cheated.” Umm, what?
To claim Biggio used PEDs with somewhere in the neighborhood of zero evidence is downright unethical. One could say the same thing about Mike Piazza, because all suspicion of Piazza’s usage stems from Chass himself reporting on his backne (which Piazza explained in his book).
You want to keep a guy like Rafael Palmeiro out of the Hall of Fame because of his failed test in 2005? Fine.
Just don’t keep out Piazza or Biggio or Jeff Bagwell without hard evidence that they broke the rules – especially since though their alleged use didn’t happen while the MLB conducted testing, but I digress.
You want to keep people out who never failed a test? We’re not going to see eye-to-eye.
Consider this inconvenient truth from Harvard University, which was tweeted out by Dan Szymborski this weekend. Turns out growth hormones won’t actually make you hit a baseball further:
“A team of researchers from California conducted a detailed review of 44 high-quality studies of growth hormone in athletes … After receiving daily injections for an average of 20 days, the subjects who received GH increased their lean body mass (which reflects muscle mass but can also include fluid mass) by an average of 4.6 pounds. That’s a big gain — but it did not translate into improved performance. In fact, GH did not produce measurable increases in either strength or exercise capacity.”
To recap: Growth hormone injections (such as Anabolic Steroids) did not make these athletes stronger, nor did it let them exercise more. Did it give them more muscle mass? Yes. But go ahead and ask a bodybuilder or powerlifter if muscle mass correlates to strength. If you get any answer but, “Not really,”; they don’t know what they’re talking about.
It’s easy to believe that simply taking steroids made Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs in 1996 when he never hit more than 24 in any other year. But it wasn’t exactly like Anderson was a slap hitter (.800 OPS in the four years prior to 1996). Also he had a lineup around him that consisted of Palmeiro, Roberto Alomar, Cal Ripken, Jr., B.J. Surhoff, and Bobby Bonilla. In 1997, Anderson played with a broken rib, missed 29 games in 1998, the 35-year-old hit .282/.404/.477 with 24 home runs.
To the best of my knowledge and research, he’s never been accused of using steroids by any of his teammates and was not named in the Mitchell Report.
He may have been using steroids, but that doesn’t mean that that allowed him to magically hit a bunch of home runs in ‘96. His performance was likely an aberration caused by several different factors.
So that’s one example, but I’ll do my due diligence and deal with some larger samples.
There were 103 players listed on the Mitchell Report. Eleven of them could be classified as star players, and that’s if you want to count Brian Roberts as a star player. For every Barry Bonds in the report, there’s nine F.P. Santangelos.
Of 38 positive tests spread across 34 players since the MLB’s testing program went into effect, only Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez and Bartolo Colon were ever really considered star players at any point in their careers. For every Braun, there’s nearly 4 Alex Sanchezes.
It’s time for us to come to our collective senses here. If you were one of the best players of your era, you belong in Cooperstown.
Do we discriminate against players who played when blacks were not allowed? Should we put an asterisk next to Hank Aaron and Willie Mays because they took greenies? Or what about one next to Tip O’Neill, who hit .485 in 1887, when it took five balls to walk you, four strikes to strike you out, and walks were counted as hits in batting average? The pitcher’s mound has been moved forward and back, up and down, and we look at Bob Gibson the same way as Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn or Clayton Kershaw.
We don’t treat those players with double standards because of the rules of the era that they played in, nor should we treat players from the 90s and early 00s with them. If you were a great player, you were a great player.
It’s time to end the double standard.
Joe Vasile is the voice of the Fayetteville (NC) SwampDogs. Follow him on Twitter at @JoeVasilePBP.
Wow … I just so disagree on so many points … like
How relevant is Bob Gibson to Mark McGwire? Moving the mound, or changing the number of strikes/balls impacts every player equally. If you want to bring up Gaylord Perry, that’s another story.
If you are going to Biggio, care show how grotesque others got?
Why contradict yourself? Either “the best players of an era” get into the hall, or keeping Raffy out would be “fine” with you. Which is it?
I can appreciate that Clemens and Bonds dominated two periods in baseball. That’s sad for them, because I could care less about their entire careers now; they sit in the same pew as Caminiti and Sosa.
Hopefully the money they made compensated them for the glory they have passed up.
Jerry, I know very well that I’m in the minority and that this is a very controversial opinion to have. You have every right to disagree with me, and I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong. We’re all entitled to our opinions.
To your point about Biggio, I put that picture there just to illustrate the very point you made: other steroid guys got huge and grotesque and he did not, which only helps further the lack of evidence for his suspicion.
As far as contradicting myself, I don’t see it that way. I keep Raffy out because he tested positive. Nobody else that I mentioned failed a test. If you used steroids before testing, you weren’t really breaking the rules.
I think the theme Joe is aiming for is this; If you have proof a player cheated, that is a legitimate reason to keep him out of the HOF. Otherwise, speculation should not keep anyone out. Maybe I’m misreading that, though.
Wow is right JG. I could think of other words too, including appalling. How on earth you can compare discrimination based on race, and the total utter human ignorance behind it, with people who willfully cheated to prosper is simply shocking.
These people cheated (which is to say those that did). They cheated through their own decision to do so and only for personal gain. Cheaters continue on this path today for the same greed and continue to be rewarded. Rewarding them with a place on the Hall completely flips over any sense of reason.
Lance Armstrong doped continuously for a decade, and during competition more or less never turned up a positive test. When the jig was up he confessed, and cycling stripped him of every win and banned him for life. Baseball should be following WADA and IOC guidelines.
In court, to find someone guilty of murder or some crime, you must prove that they did it beyond reasonable doubt. The idea is that is better to let hundreds of guilty criminals be free than it is to imprison just 1 innocent person.
This train of thought can be applied to the HOF conundrum: It is better to exclude many worthy candidates than to let even one cheater slip through the cracks and make it into the HOF.
On the other hand, Joe seems to think that the opposite: that it is better to include everyone with the possibility that some unidentified cheaters make it in.
There’s no right or wrong way to this problem that we have. However, the majority seem to want to go with the first train of thought, probably because of the fact that we have adopted its use in other areas of life as well.
For your analogy wouldn’t you want to line up the two guilty parts? In Part A, being guilty is murder and Part B being guilty means using steroids.
So if it’s better to let guilty people go free than imprison an innocent person, isn’t it better to let guilty people in the HOF than to exclude one non-steroids guy?
Yea, the way i set up the analogy i should have phrased it the way you did. I flip-flopped it because i wanted to show the majority position before the minority.
Still, no matter how you phrase it, it still falls into the two positions:
1. Let everyone in, which may include some cheats, to not exclude any honest men
2. Be as restrictive as possible, which may exclude some honest men, to not include any cheats.
There’s no right answer to this question. Purely a matter of opinion.
Post removed for violating the Comment Policy
Click the embedded link and read it from yourself. It comes from Harvard University, not some fly-by-night organization. I quoted an entire section directly from the text.
This was a well-reasoned discussion of the issues by Joe. It’s a refreshing change from most sportswriting on the subject. Kudos.