I recently articulated my position regarding why PED cheaters should not be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I rarely provide links to ESPN.com, for reasons that should be obvious, but once in a while the site provides a gem. Former MLB player Doug Glanville offered a passionate and well-reasoned argument about why he is OK with Barry Bonds not being elected to the Hall of Fame.
Glanville makes a great point while refuting the notion that not electing Barry Bonds and the other PED cheaters is wrong because the Baseball Hall of Fame is a history museum: the story of PED cheating can be thoroughly told without electing Bonds and the other cheaters, because there is a difference between telling history and honoring people who behaved poorly. Of course the history of the PED era should be told: instead of inducting Commissioner Bud Selig--perhaps the worst commissioner in major North American sports in the past several decades--he should have towered over the PED exhibit as the poster boy of ineffective leadership that permitted the cheaters to damage the game and destroy baseball's record book, which should now only be shelved in the fiction section of libraries and bookstores.
The whole article is worth reading (just mute the speakers on your device to spare yourself the agony of hearing "Screamin' A" Smith yelling that Barry Bonds should be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame--to find one "diamond" on ESPN.com you must traverse a lot of "rough"), but here are some excerpts to whet your appetite:
The most common argument for the inclusion of PED users in the Hall is that we can't ignore the past, and trust me--I hold no rose-colored glasses to the idealism of this game's origins. Throughout my playing career, I was always acutely aware that players who looked like me once could not even participate in that history. And yes, there are likely players who are in the Hall now who took PEDs and got away with it. Yes, there are players in the Hall who took amphetamines, whose behavior would not have lived up to the policies today. But why should any of that stop us from being better now?
We all accept that the Hall of Fame is a museum, tasked with telling the full story. But it is also a shrine. There should be a difference between being recognized in the Hall of Fame and being honored by it. I am represented in the Baseball Hall of Fame--or at least, my senior thesis from college is. Does that mean that I am a Hall of Famer? I doubt my .277 batting average and 59 home runs would have gotten me in. And I am fine with that.
I don't see why this distinction cannot be made who took PEDs and also had a record-setting impact. If we want to recognize PED users in the Hall, we can build them an exhibit, or even their own wing. We should acknowledge all of our history, both glorious and ugly. Like I am, with my paper, they can be in the Hall--as a fixture and as a recognition of their accomplishments. But I don't see why they need a plaque.
What we celebrate--what we enshrine--should have a different set of criteria. We cannot treat induction into the Hall as simply an act of historical graduation--automatic entry into the Hall because the numbers are in record books--especially when the inductees did not stand on the shoulders of their predecessors so much as trample them into the ground with glee...
With some of these players, their proponents make the argument that they would have been Hall of Famers whether or not they used. I have always been skeptical that anyone could know for sure when or if a player started taking PEDs. But more importantly, when you make a choice that artificially manipulates your performance and your future, it colors your past. Fairly or not.
We simply can't say what these enhanced players would do or be without the stuff. I was drafted in 1991, one pick in front of Manny Ramirez, a player some call the "greatest right-handed hitter of all time." Maybe he was; maybe he deserved to be drafted ahead of me. But I did not fail two tests and miss 150 games because of it. I do not know what kind of hitter he would have been without what he took. No one does. So talking about picking me over Ramirez is like comparing apples to oranges. We weren't even playing the same sport in the end. Good for him--he made his money, he won world championships. But does he need to be enshrined as an example of the best of our sport? The answer to that question is really up to us...
Nearly a decade ago, I worked on a task force with the United States Anti-Doping Agency. I was helping to evaluate a report on youth sports to understand what gives young people the fullest, healthiest and most enjoyable experience when participating in sport. Also in the group was an ethicist by the name of Tom Murray, and he said something that stuck with me: "You reward what you value."
If we are to reward players with induction into the Hall, it should be based on our values. We are the ones who need to decide the difference between being great and being consequential.
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