What Should Major League Baseball Do With Cheaters Eligible for the Hall of Fame?

Major League Baseball has a problem that may be unique in the history of organized sports leagues: Pretty much all of the best baseball players of the 1990s and early 2000s cheated by using performance enhancing drugs. Some players, like Alex Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro, and Mark McGwire, are confirmed steroid users; others, like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, are generally assumed to have used steroids but have denied it in court (both Bonds and Clemens are scheduled to be tried for perjury in 2011 as a result of these denials).

The question of who was using steroids in the 1990s is a murky one, because MLB, shockingly, didn’t make random steroid testing mandatory until 2004, after nearly 7 percent of players subjected to anonymous testing were found to be using PEDs. Before that, the names of steroid users weren’t release--there was no public shaming and little consequences for using drugs that could improve a player’s performance and earn him millions of dollars in extra salary. 

Baseball’s mismanagement of the steroid issue is coming up now because those stars whose artificially-aided hitting brilliance is generally credited with keeping the sport popular and viable in the late 1990s are now eligible for the Hall of Fame, and baseball writers are tasked with deciding not only whether or not steroid users should be banned from the Hall, but also who used steroids--an impossible task.

For an example of how messy the next decade of Hall of Fame ballots will be, look at the case of Jeff Bagwell. He was one of the best players in Houston Astros history, and the only MLB baseball player to ever hit 400 home runs and steal 200 bases in his career. Yet he wasn’t voted in this year, largely because he is suspected of using steroids. Some HOF voters, like ESPN’s Jayson Stark--who wrote a long, insightful column explaining his voting philosophy—think that steroid users should be admitted to the Hall with a note explaining that they used steroids. Others, like Dan Graziano, say that the whole era was tainted by the rampant cheating and want to reserve judgment until. . .well, that isn’t clear. Presumably until Bagwell proves his innocence, although how he can do that is beyond me, since there were many years when he wasn’t even being tested for steroids.

Should the Hall of Fame ban everyone who tested positive? What about those players like A-Rod and Bonds, who probably would have had HOF-caliber careers without the aid of drugs? Since both hitters and pitchers were using steroids, do the resulting effects cancel each other out at all? In what way was steroid use different from the use of amphetamines (“greenies”) that previous generations of ballplayers used? Wasn’t the widely accepted use of spitballs in an even earlier era a form of cheating? 

Nearly every writer who votes for the HOF has a different set of opinions on these subjects, and that’s a problem, because MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and Hall of Fame chairman Jane Forbes Clark refuse to make a judgment call on any of the above questions. Just as MLB ignored the steroid scandal until they couldn’t, they seem to be fine letting the votes fall where they may. Consider this quote from an article on the controversy: 

Clark says she doesn't make her own evaluations.

“The lovely thing about being chairman of the Hall of Fame is that you don’t need to,” she said. “That's the writers’ job.”

Meanwhile, Pete Rose, who many writers would probably vote for and who never cheated while on the field, remains banned from baseball, and the Hall. Why is he banned while an entire generation of cheaters and maybe-cheaters get their legacies decided by a fickle and often self-contradicting group of sportswriters?

It’s too late to take away the highlight reels, endorsement deals, and nine-figure contracts from players like A-Rod and Bonds. The most viable tool for punishing the cheaters is taking away or restricting their Hall of Fame eligibility, but MLB refuses to even address this issue. Until Selig or the next commissioner does, expect the same arguments about Bagwell, Palmeiro, et al. to be repeated every year. World Series ratings have been declining for years, and baseball’s popularity is steadily waning. Does the sport really need a new crop of negative news stories every winter?