The Hall Of Fame

Congratulations to Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn, the two newest inductees into the baseball Hall of Fame. They are certainly worthy of election. Personally, I think there are a number of other players on the ballot who deserve to be in -- Bert Blyleven, Andre Dawson, and (yes) Mark McGwire, for example -- but I have no problem with Ripken and Gwynn, two icons of one-team baseball, having the dais all to themselves.

Much has been written about how neither election was unanimous. That doesn't bother me. Greater players than Ripken have been voted into the Hall without a unanimous vote. In fact, there has never been a unanimous election to the HoF -- every electee, including Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Ty Cobb, Nolan Ryan, you name 'em -- has been left off of someone's ballot. 'Twas ever thus.

What does make me cranky is The Daily Southtown's Paul Ladewski, who is getting an awful lot of press for
his blank ballot, submitted as some sort of protest against steroid use in baseball:

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.

This isn't to suggest that Gwynn or Ripken or the majority of the other eligible candidates padded his statistics with performance-enhancers and cheated the game, their predecessors and the fans in the process.

[...]

But tell me, except for the players themselves, who can say what they put into their bodies over the years with any degree of certainty?

This strikes me as the worst sort of sloppy logical fallacy, as well as a way to draw attention away from Gwynn & Ripken and onto himself. He manages to smear the names of Gwynn & Ripken, all he while protesting that of course he's not suggesting that they used steroids, it's just that, well, they played when all these other people did, and so who can really know for sure? It's poor journalism at best, and cowardly at worst.

The problem is, he undercuts his own "argument" with this conclusion:

"Rest assured that I haven't written off anyone who played in the 'Roids Rage Age permanently. At this time next year, the Barry Bonds case may have revealed more substantive evidence on the subject. Maybe some of the names of the nearly 100 big-leaguers whom federal investigators said tested positive for steroids will become public information. And maybe a few of them will come forward to tell us what they know, good or bad."

So after spending most of the article saying that there's no one who can say for sure who took steroids and who didn't, he suggests that at some point in the future more evidence might come to light which will clear things up? How? How will the players who played between 1993 and 2004 prove to Ladewski, or anyone else, that they didn't use steroids? Major League Baseball didn't test for steroids during that time, so until we're able to go back in time and retroactively institute testing, the players of that era (and every other one) will apparently live in Ladewski's brain in some sort of neverland.

Besides, even if we could test the players from that era, you can't test a negative. Barry Bonds has been tested for steroids along with every other major league baseball player over the last few seasons and hasn't tested positive once. Yet that doesn't change what seems to be a rock-solid belief by many that he used PEDs during that period. Some people are going to believe whatever they want to believe, evidence (or the lack of it) be damned.

Let me be clear -- much of the fault for this lies with MLB. For years they turned a blind eye toward something that many people near the game knew was a regular occurrence. Now they're left to deal with the result of that willful ignorance, which is a game which, though it enjoys an unprecedented level of popularity, is paradoxically dogged by doubts about its integrity.

I'm not trying to argue that Gwynn, or Ripken, or anyone else did or didn't use steroids. Just like Ladewski, I don't know if they did or not. Unlike Ladewski, however, I'm not going to penalize them and every other potential Hall of Famer from the 90s and 00s because of what I don't know. If I had a vote for the Hall, I'd look at what the players did on the field under the rules of the game at the time they played. Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken deserve to be voted into the Hall of Fame, and if Paul Ladewski, for whatever reason, believes they don't, then he shouldn't be allowed to take part in the voting process.