We knew. Players knew. Owners knew. Everybody knew, and we didn’t say anything about it.

– Tony Gwynn

I hope that as time goes on, that number will increase. I hope that one day he will get into the Hall of Fame, because I really believe he deserves it.

– Gwynn on Mark McGwire

I don’t think it’s my place to actually cast judgment.

– Cal Ripken

This memorandum sets forth Baseball’s drug policy and the principal components of our drug abuse program. As in the past, the health and welfare of those who work in Baseball will continue to be our paramount concern. No less compelling, however, is the need to maintain the integrity of the game. Drug involvement or the suspicion of drug involvement is inconsistent with maintaining those objectives.

-Fay Vincent, commissioner, June 17, 1991

There’s that big black cloud hanging over baseball with steroids. It’s a shame. There are a lot of great players in that era. Who knows what’s going to happen?

– Rich Gossage

The election is over, and baseball has two more heroes to enshrine. But the problem of Hall of Fame voting for players in the Steroids Era is only beginning.

Daily Southtown writer Paul Ladewski has taken some heat for the blank ballot he submitted this year, ironically because it prevented unanimous admission for Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn and not for the substantive reasons that he did so. That journalists have castigated Ladewski further demonstrates how much the baseball world would prefer to bask in the superficiality of pomp and avoid the harsh reality of its problems.

It seem to us that Ladewski is onto something, reasoning that “At this point, I don’t have nearly enough information to make a value judgment of this magnitude. In particular, that concerns any player in the Steroids Era, which I consider to be the 1993-2004 period, give or a take a season.”

Ladewski is being kind in his date range. After all, the era goes at least as far back as 1991, when then-commissioner Fay Vincent plainly banned steroids, among other drugs, as a matter of baseball policy in his memo to every major-league team. And we have yet to see any reason why the PED era should be capped, what with nary a whiff of trustworthy testing evidenced in the latest collective-bargaining agreement.

Our solution is to impose a moratorium on Hall of Fame inductions. That is, the career years of every player, manager, executive or writer from 1992 (the first full year after Vincent’s memo) until whenever baseball decides to get serious about the PED problem should be considered invalid for Cooperstown consideration. Writers can continue to debate and vote on the worthiness of players such as Jim Rice and Bert Blyleven, but the 1992+ years of players like Mark McGwire, Jeff Bagwell and Randy Johnson would be placed alongside Pete Rose as black marks on the game, never to be honored.

It’s a severe position, to be sure, but if this is as serious a dilemma as it seems, severe actions are the only kind that will bring about a solution. If the feckless Bug Selig were to somehow miraculously find the courage to make such a proclamation, it might actually have the intended effect of enticing baseball’s powers — its owners and players’ union — to do something more than give lip service to dubious policies.

The downside is that many truly outstanding — and clean — players will be barred from the sport’s most hallowed hall. But while those players may not have ever used steroids, they can hardly be considered innocent. If the astoundingly flippant remarks from Gwynn are close to accurate, the non-using players, Gwynn included, bear a tremendous responsibility for turning a blind eye, when essentially, baseball trusted them to police themselves, and they broke that trust. Gossage is right: there are a lot of great players in that era. It’s too bad for them that they weren’t responsible enough to see to it that their reputations were beyond besmirching. Ripken undoubtedly speaks for many of his peers in “not wanting to cast judgment,” yet he and the majority of other players have already judged that they are above the game, not beholden to the rules of its ethos, stated or otherwise, that work to preserve its integrity in the same way as prohibitions against gambling. Performance-enhancing drug use, like gambling, may in a vacuum seem a harmless personal choice, but when set in the context of a sport, irreparably tears the fabric of perceived fair play.

Many have trotted out the “innocent-until-proven-guilty” canard in defense of Mark McGwire, et al. But if the United Nations-like justice system of Major League Baseball can’t even “prove” that Rafael Palmeiro — who failed a drug test — is guilty of intentional doping, doesn’t the situation more appropriately demand a negative burden of proof? Moreover, all players have rendered and continue to render themselves guilty when they, through their own stolidity (whether conscious or not), avoid all manner of responsibility and willingly compete without care as to the integrity of their game.

Conscience-stricken and self-loathing writers across the country are coming to grips with the quandry of actually having to make a moral decision in a case in which they are expected to use moral judgment, and the results are rather pathetic. Under the cop-out of refusing to do Selig’s job for him and not wanting to act as “morality police,” many writers have again shown that they aren’t deserving of the authority with which they’ve been entrusted. But this further points to the need for an edict from on high that illuminates the depravity of the situation. We certainly don’t expect anything of the sort from the man who has been exceptionally negligent — and perhaps as complicit in the steroids problem as anyone — as commissioner. But we see no alternative short of the shock of our proposal to banish the generation of villains who would purport to be worthy of consideration for Cooperstown glory, unashamedly admitting to defrauding fans one minute and then insulting them by essentially saying it didn’t matter the next. In the future, the Hall’s closed doors to 20+ years of collusive cheaters would stand as a solemn reminder of the wages of both apathy and disdain for baseball’s public trust from the men who play and organize the sport. After all, “no less compelling is the need to maintain the integrity of the game.”

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 1:58 am and is filed under editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.