Hall of Fame

[anne25]

Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn voted in. McGwire didn't make the cut.

final results 2007 Baseball Hall of Fame Election

[Ultimate]

Sounds like the way it should be. I don't want to see McGwire in there.

Ripken and Gwynn definetely deserve it though.

[RickJay]

I can't think of one solid reason why McGwire SHOULDN'T be in. If he's ever been caught with a banned substance, I must have missed the press release.

He'll get in eventually. It won't hurt anyone if he has to wait.

Ripken and Gwynn were no brainers, which makes you wonder who the idiots were who didn't vote for them.

[WilsonC]

It doesn't bother me that McGwire didn't get in this year, as the media circus surrounding his controversy would have been unfair to Gwynn and Ripken. Congratualtions to two clearly deserving players.

That said, I would vote for McGwire.

First off, I don't know for a fact he did anything illegal. Like most, I have stong enough suspicions that I would be surprised if he never took anything illegal, but there's no real evidence.

Now, suppose we just accept that he used steroids. Or suppose that he admits to it, or real evidence turns up to prove it. Would I still vote for him? Yes, I would. Just as I would vote for Palmeiro or Bonds or any other player who's on-field achievements I feel are HoF worthy, even if they got caught for steroid use.

I won't get into the semantics of whether it was technically illegal in Baseball and whether it was cheating or exploiting a loophole or whatever. Rather, I look at the fact that now that it is officially outlawed, it is still not a lifetime banning. If we fault players retroactively for steroid use, the penalty for this form of cheating does not automatically exclude a player from the Hall of Fame. Steroid use, scuffing a ball, corking a bat, intentionally throwing at a batter, using too much pine tar, betting on baseball - these are all offenses that have their own penalties, and of these examples, only the last one is an expulsion from Baseball. Known cheaters are elected into the Hall of Fame, as long as the form of cheating doesn't elicit the type of negative emotional response as steroid use currently does in our culture.

So, based on the above, cheating in and of itself is not enough to keep someone out of the Hall of Fame. Rather, we can look at cheating as part of an overall integrity, as character is something that is a consideration. The problem I have with this is that a player's character is never thoroughly examined for Hall of Fame voting, and the only impressions of a player's character we get tend to be oversimplifications of a superficial aspect of a player's overall persona that's then presented by the media in a way that makes him out as either a hero or a villain, on in this case, a fallen-hero. There may be a handful of cases where a particular problem personality tips the voter's choice on a borderline candidate like Dick Allen, but if the numbers are there, known scoundrels, cheaters, racists, womanizers, and people with all sorts of character flaws generally get voted in without a second thought. McGwire always had a good reputation as a good team mate, a hard worker, a good father, has spent a great deal of time and money helping charities for abused children, and even chose an honorable retirement with a sizeable contract extension on the table when he felt he could no longer perform at an elite level. He's also a man who (in all likelyhood) made a poor ethical decision under conditions that many otherwise decent people would have made the same decision. That doesn't make it right, but I just don't think the scandal surrounding him, even if true, is enough to generalize that the man lacks overall integrity.

Rather, I look at PED's as being one of the prevalent problems surrounding the game in recent years. Most eras have these problems (game fixing, racism, collusion, etc.) and while steroids are the emotional, dirty issue on the minds of people today, I think as time passes people will gain more perspective on it as being an era in baseball with steroids as one of its problems, rather than a truly dark era of baseball. When that happens, people will be able to look more rationally at the problem from a less emotion-driven level. Myself, I put some of the blame on the users, as I feel it is a poor ethical choice, regardless of the motivation. I put a little of the blame on the clean players who knew about the problem but chose to ignore it. But I put most of the blame on the league, as they allowed the problem to be swept under the rug, creating a situation where players were almost encouraged to cheat due to the fact that they saw players around them reaping the rewards of dishonesty with little to no risk of getting caught or penalized. Right now, McGwire's the easiest target at whom people are directing anger and disappointment, but I don't agree with making McGwire and a few suspicious power hitters the fall guys for the problems of the era. In a way, doing so would feel to me like a denial of a widespread problem, trying to isolate it to a specific false steriotype of what a steroid user must look like. Dishonest or not, PED's are now a part of the history of Baseball, and play a definite role in the context of the era. It seems more intelectually honest to me for a voter to judge players based on what they did on the field in the context of the era than to try to guess at who might be a user based on the amount of smoke around the player or how many homeruns he hit.

[85Jays]

I can't think of one solid reason why McGwire SHOULDN'T be in. If he's ever been caught with a banned substance,

I could probably come up with reasons why I wouldn't vote him in, but I won't go into it, because I'm not here to talk about the past.

[anne25]

Then no HOF for you.