MLBTR Chat Transcript: Didi, Castillo, ChiSox, Moose, Yankees

Because every player cheated or played against someone that cheated and though it is a cynical way to look at the world, if your opponent is cheating, your cheating only evens the playing field.

1) The spitball was banned for all but two players per team in 1919, So arbitrarily if you were on a team with two great spitball pitchers, you could not continue using that pitch in 1920. In 1920, the spitball was permanently banned from the sport with the exception of the players who were still using that pitch, who could use it for the remained of their careers,. Stan Coveleski (played until 1928), Red Faber (until 1933), and Burleigh Grimes (until 1934) all are in the HOF. Even Urban Shocker who used it until 1928 should be in the HOF had he not died at the age of 38 with probably nobody there to petition for his inclusion. His WAR and WAR/year are far better than Koufax despite playing only one more season. So you could say as many as 3-4 HOF caliber pitchers are or will be in the HOF despite cheating for the better part of 1/2 to 3/4 of their career.

2) Years later in the 1940s and 1950s players were encouraged to workout, some of the early adopters of weight training and working out were none other than Ruth (mid-1920s), Teddy Ballgame in the 1940s, and Stan The Man. Should we consider that cheating?

3) When Bonds and Clemens were using steroids, over half the league was using steroids, should we put everyone in the hall of fame who was just below the standard, but played clean? How about we grab guys like Jay Buhner, Paul O’Neill, Cecil Fielder, Frank Viola, and Al Leiter to name a few. Buhner and Fielder were around 20 WAR for their career, but had they played in the 50s, their numbers would’ve overshadowed Maris who finished closer to 40 WAR. Let’s not forget that Fielder also lost prime years in Japan. O’Neill, Leiter, and Viola all had around 40-45 WAR for their career, but how much better would all 5 of these players have been playing against not steroids users. If you aren’t going to put them in for having the character to not cheat and as a result fall short of the HOF, we shouldn’t penalize a player for doing what was necessary to stay level with the cheaters who looked to get into the HOF purely due to ‘roids. Take Bonds and Clemens as examples, should they have used? No. Are they great people? Probably not. But most importantly, even if you take steroids away and half their production, they are easy 1st ballot HOF caliber players.

4) Using steroids is not a slam dunk to get you better, you still have to workout in the gym to get a benefit from using them. It just allows for quicker recovery and no loss of muscle tone when grinding through a long season. It’s not like McGwire showed up at 6’5″ and 275 lbs. because he injected a shot in him. The reality is that Bonds and McGwire both were gym rats and used steroids to repair and stabilize the muscles due to their hard work in the gym. I haven’t and wouldn’t use steroids, but I’m not going to be so dismissive like there was no sweat equity involved in their careers.

5) At which point do you look at players who get LASIK surgery or who spend all night in the gym like Rickey Henderson and Carlton Fisk and say these guys are definitely cheating. Cheating is an unfair advantage by definition. But isn’t work ethic and diligence a form of unfair advantage and could then be construed as cheating? Players all have demons they deal with for being dishonest, too honest, for working too hard at the cost of their social life or for being too lazy and leaving something on the field when they walk away. It is impossible to fairly measure the life of a person, so I suggest we measure their stats without the bias of implied cheating or wrong doing, because we really don’t know how much that helped or hurt them.

6) If the Hall of Fame is the story of baseball and there is a place in there for announcers, owners, a woman’s league which had no connection to MLB (before you go PC Police on me, we don’t enshrine Sadaharu Oh despite a career average of .301 and 868 career homeruns in the Nippon league), coaches, umpires, mascots, vendors, and fans, I have to believe that story needs Bonds, Clemens, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Pete Rose, and all the greatest players and stories of baseball. If for no other reason than to share the cautionary tales of the sport as well.

Cheating is bad, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want my boys to go through Cooperstown and not know how Bonds changed the game for a couple seasons in the 2000s or to point at a picture of Clemens and tell my son how that is the intensity of a champion, cause it is and was despite the other sad elements to his career. How do talk about running everything out and hustling without using Pete Rose as an example? Can you really tell the story of the 1919 Black Sox team without talking about Joe Jackson? And how do you explain how good he was if there is nothing there to reference?

It’s the Hall of Fame, the enshrinement of baseballs greatest stories, Not the Hall of Honest or the enshrinement of good deeds.