I’ve brought all three of my children up knowing that Hank Aaron is the home run king with 755.
Sure, they know who Barry Bonds was, that he was, in addition to an elite talent, a cheat who is the most glaring emblem of baseball’s Steroids Era.
If journalist Jeff Passan had his way we’d tell them Bonds is the home run king with 762 and we’d find a place for him in the Hall of Fame.
In a recent piece Passan makes a case (a very flimsy one it turns out) for why Bonds and other players who knowingly took banned or illegal substances to boost their performance should be in the Hall of Fame. Passan thinks the Hall is an institution of history and therefore needs to include guys like Bonds and Roger Clemens who were both excluded from the Hall on their 10th and final time on the ballot.[1]Bonds, Clemens and pitcher Curt Schilling, whose political views have stirred controversy, were not voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America for their 10th … Continue reading
Passan calls Bonds’s exclusion from the Hall an “abject failure” and accuses baseball of valuing a “lazy, ahistorical moral referendum over the preservation of history.”
It turns out nothing could be further from the truth.
Jeff Passan’s lazy moral calculus
What’s lazy is Passan’s moral reasoning.
“I think that the Hall of Fame exists best as a museum,” he said on ESPN. “And a museum talks about history. And you cannot tell the history of Major League Baseball without the man who hit more home runs than anyone, without the man who hit more home runs in a single season than anyone, without the man who won seven MVP awards. …. He’s right up there with Babe Ruth, he’s write up there with Willie Mays.”
But here’s the thing: We can consider hundreds of those Bonds home runs actually (pun intended here) foul.[2]The word foul here can mean tainted but it can also suggest a foul ball, as in a struck baseball that lands outside the realm of the playing field and therefore would have no statistical relevance. From 2001-07, the period during which he’s known to have used banned substances to enhance his performance, Bonds received more than half (four) of his seven MVP awards. He also produced 268 HR (more than 35% of his tainted total) and 591 RBI over this stretch.[3]As has been widely documented and analyzed, Bonds’s numbers during this time went way up over his previous seasons, even though he was playing during his age 36-42 seasons when virtually every … Continue reading Take away those HRs and he sits at 494 for his career—way down on the all-time list.
I don’t consider the numbers put up during this time as legitimate. I don’t put them into a historical record any more than I’d say Lance Armstrong is a 7x Tour de France winner.
If you cheated you’re disqualified. Disqualified from the record books, from (often) awards and titles, and from institutions that set out to tell the history of the highest achievement in the sport.
You didn’t achieve, you only deceived.
No surprises
This stance should not come as a surprise. Nor is it legitimate to call it morally highfalutin.
Since the time we’re in grade school we’re taught that things like lying, cheating and stealing are not permissible. Virtually every society on earth has consequences for these acts.
Passan wants us to prioritize history over our moral sensibility.
He wants us to place the “accomplishments” of Bonds and other known cheats like Clemens right alongside those of others, blending in with those others and even surpassing and overshadowing them as the greatest of their era.
Sure they cheated, his reasoning seems to go, and you can mention it but pretty much everyone from that time did.
Actually, following that reasoning even further: There may be several players excluded from the Hall whose overall numbers were compromised by the cheaters who routinely outperformed them.
The blame game
How is it that they did?
Passan blames the then-commissioner of baseball Bud Selig for allowing Bonds and others to get away with illegitimately murdering baseballs. But in the end this is about as disingenuous as it gets.
The steroid era happened not just under the eyes of the commissioner but under the eyes of far too many journalists whose job was to scrutinize and report on what was going on and who failed for years to follow suspicions around steroid use as they arose.
The first notable mention of steroids came to us by way of Washington Post reporter Thomas Boswell—in 1988.
One should then consider the type of work journalists covering baseball and armed with this lead did over the next 15 years. The track record of Passan’s predecessors[4]Passan started covering MLB in 2004, just after the Steroid Era ended. is dismal. And it’s also rarely if ever mentioned by journalists themselves.
In ’98, while the Cardinals Mark McGwire and the Cubs Sammy Sosa were swatting homers at a record-setting pace, a journalist Steve Willstein saw a curious substance exposed in McGwire’s locker during a postgame interview.
The collective response? Willstein was excoriated, including by his peers. Rather than follow this up with a thorough investigation of the matter, the journalists continued to follow the main story line all the way to its heroic, record-breaking conclusion.
Save for Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, it was mostly players, not the journalists covering them daily, who broke the story of their steroid use.
And now some of these same journalists want to convince the public why the players should be voted by those journalists into the Hall of Fame?[5]Passan, who in years past has voted for both Bonds and Clemens, gave up his Hall of Fame vote in 2018.
How to resolve this
Baseball and the Hall cannot always say definitively who cheated and who didn’t. Amphetamines, corked bats and spitballs are all part of the history of the game, including for some inductees. But where evidence of having cheated exists those players should be excluded.
It’s all a messy, complicated affair. But the effort to get it right, to push for some moral compass, no matter how hypocritical the past may make it all seem, carries great value.
It shows that the Hall, however flawed, wants to stand for something. It’s going to value not just what you did but how you did it.
Baseball can still put guys like Bonds and Clemens and whoever else used steroids into the Hall. Give them their own collective wing of shame for all I care. But don’t enshrine them—don’t honor them.
And don’t replicate the lie and tell me that someone hit a home run when the results in myriad instances, minus their acts of deception, would have been different.
And please don’t ask me by implication to pass along to my children, by way of a whisper, something like “Cheating isn’t really good but if you do it and succeed there’s still a grand place for you.”
It ain’t gonna happen. And thankfully it won’t for guys like Bonds and Clemens either.
(Featured Image photo of Barry Bonds by guano used under CC BY-SA)
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | Bonds, Clemens and pitcher Curt Schilling, whose political views have stirred controversy, were not voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America for their 10th and final year of eligibility. All three, in other words, again fell short of the 75% minimum required for Hall induction. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | The word foul here can mean tainted but it can also suggest a foul ball, as in a struck baseball that lands outside the realm of the playing field and therefore would have no statistical relevance. |
| ↑3 | As has been widely documented and analyzed, Bonds’s numbers during this time went way up over his previous seasons, even though he was playing during his age 36-42 seasons when virtually every athlete sees an inevitable decline in performance. |
| ↑4 | Passan started covering MLB in 2004, just after the Steroid Era ended. |
| ↑5 | Passan, who in years past has voted for both Bonds and Clemens, gave up his Hall of Fame vote in 2018. |