Steroids In Baseball
Paul Merolla
ENG 101
Yoshiaki Furui
12/13/12
Summary
My letter to the Baseball Writers Association of America addresses the issue of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball and the induction of accused players into the hall of fame. I argue that no player should be left out of the hall just because of steroids for several reasons. Unfortunately, steroids were a part of the culture of the game during the steroid era and it is about time that we accept that. Baseball is a competitive game in which you need to keep up with those around you in order to keep your job and many players felt steroids were the only solution. Unfortunately, the steroid era has cast a shadow over the game under which no player can …show more content…
go without suspicion whether they have been accused of steroids or not. Also, of those accused, many were on a track to the hall of fame before there is any evidence at all that they started taking steroids and therefore they have a right to a place in the hall. Lastly, we cannot penalize the players for being the best at what they do. It takes a lot more that just the muscle provided by steroids to be successful in the game of baseball and these players have showed us that. Whether or not to allow these players into the hall of fame is one of the toughest decisions ever to face the game of baseball and I can only hope the voters make the correct decision.
An Era to be Forgiven
Dear Members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Today I write you in order to shed some light on an issue that I am sure you all are already thinking about plentifully. It is that time of year again when hall of fame votes are due and I know that you all have a vote. We have recently entered an era in which this task of voting has become more difficult than it has ever been. We have now reached the years in which many of the greatest of players from Major League Baseball’s steroid era will be making an appearance on your ballot. It is you who is charged with making one of the toughest decisions any sports writer has ever been asked to make. The debate will rage on in the world around you but in the end, it is you and only you who can make the decision of whether or not to allow accused steroid users into the National Baseball Hall Fame. What am I doing here?
I am here to speak to you on those player’s behalf’s and to attempt to explain to you that they do belong. No player should be kept out of the hall of fame for the sole reason of steroid use. The steroid era was just that; it was an era that took place and it cannot simply be swept under the rug.
At this point it has become widely reported about, and steroid use in baseball is no longer the secret it once was. It happened and there is little that can be done about it now. There is no sense in us punishing some of the greatest players of the last two decades for the era that they played in. During the 1990’s and early 2000’s steroid use was unfortunately just a part of the game and there was nothing that the players could have done to help it once it began. Even Senator George Mitchell said when he released his report that baseball has a “serious drug culture” (Mitchell, 2007). Steroid use became so widespread in Major League Baseball that it put pressure on those players who were not using the drugs to keep up in any way they …show more content…
could. As we know, baseball is a unique game because unlike many other sports, you cannot sub players in and out throughout the game. There are only nine starting spots to be had and achieving one of them can be an incredibly difficult task in such a competitive league. Than, when you have that spot, you know in the back of your head that there is always going to be that other guy who wants to take that spot from you. There is always someone who wants your job. This competitiveness will lead players to do whatever it takes to stay at the top of their game, even if that means breaking the rules and using performance-enhancing drugs. Especially in the heat of the steroid era when so many people around were using steroids, some players felt they had to in order to keep their job. These men play one of the most competitive games in the world; you cannot penalize them for trying to keep their jobs by doing what everyone else was doing. Steroid use had a ripple effect throughout the game. When more players started using them, it caused even more players to start using them, even if they did not play the same position. During this era, playing the game were some of the best pitchers to ever toe the rubber and it was hard enough for the hitters to keep up. Now say some of those pitchers started to use performance-enhancing drugs and their pitchers start coming in that much harder. It is only logical for some of the games top hitters to say, hey if he is going to cheat than I am too, otherwise I have no chance. It was all just a matter of pure competition between the players in baseball. What makes even less sense about these players being penalized is that it is impossible to know for sure who did what. All of the accusations that have been made are just that. They are accusations. Very few players have actually had it proven that they used performance enhancing drugs. Are there some players with much more evidence built up against them than others? Yes, absolutely, but it cannot just be assumed that every single player whose name has been mentioned with steroids is guilty. Than what about all those players than did not get caught because I guarantee there are tons of them. We will never be able to grasp the full extent of the problem when there are still so many possible users out there who did not get caught, so those who did, are taking all of the blame.
What all of this ignores is all of the great players during the steroid era who were not in fact using steroids. How will their names ever be taken seriously? Can they ever enter the hall of fame without being questioned? It seems to me that because of the steroid problem there will always be a “veil of suspicion” hovering over any player’s head from this era (Smith, 2012). Who is to say that a player being inducted who has never been linked to steroids is not just as guilty as those who have? For instance, Barry Larkin was inducted into the hall of fame just this past summer. Larkin was undoubtedly one of the greatest infielders of all time but one thing he was never considered was a great power hitter. In fact, he never hit more than twenty homeruns in any season, except for in 1996. In 1996, Barry Larkin hit thirty-three homeruns, a miraculous number by his standards, and right in the middle of the steroid era. Am I accusing Larkin of using PED’s? Of course not, he has never faced such accusations, as there is no such evidence. However, simply because of when he played, we are left to wonder, as we are with many players. Letting everyone into the hall would stop such wondering and allow us to honor these men for the great ballplayers that they were. Believe it or not voters, these performance-enhancing drugs are not the only way that players have inorganically enhanced their performance. What about all the other medical procedures that help players get better? Today a player can get eye surgery so that his vision becomes sharper and he can see the ball better out of a pitchers hand. It does not appear that we are doing anything about that form of “cheating.” What about pitchers? When a pitcher throws his arm out these days he undergoes Tommy John surgery after which he is often a better pitcher than he was before. Fox news recently published an article that discuses young pitchers wanting to undergo Tommy John surgery without actual injury because of the enhanced performance post surgery (Grush, 2012). Should we ban all such pitchers because I do not see how surgery is that much different from a drug? Both are medical and both boost your performance. It’s not right. One of the fundamental problems with all of this is that it is only the player’s hall of fame candidacy that is being affected by this problem. Everything else that a player accused of using performance enhancing drugs may have achieved in his career is not being taken from them. You just cannot have it both ways. I agree with what Rob Parker of ESPN says that if you are not going to let them in the hall of fame than the “stats, the wins, the awards, and the championships should not be counted either” (Parker, 2012). It would be a different situation if those caught breaking the rules were punished like they were in other sports. For example, Reggie Bush had to give up his Heisman Trophy when he broke college football rules, and Lance Armstrong had to give up his Tour de France titles when he got caught using PED’s. However in baseball nothing is taken away from the players or teams that get caught. Not to say that I am arguing that the players should be stripped of their achievements because they should not; but, if Major League Baseball is going to let their achievements stand it is hypocritical to tell them that they do not belong in the hall of fame. What is a shame is that you are not allowing some players into the hall of fame because of PED use even though they most likely would have been hall of famers even if they had not used steroids. It is important to look at the facts in cases like this and know exactly when it was that players were caught using PED’s so that a judgment can be made based on what they had done before that point. It is this point that needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis and cannot have a broad blanket thrown over it. For example, let us look at four of the big steroid names appearing on your hall of fame ballot this year. Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire are four players eligible for induction this year and were some of the steroid era’s very best players. First let us take Roger Clemens, one of the most dominant pitchers of the modern era in baseball. Clemens was accused of using PED’s starting in 1998, fourteen years into his major league career. By that point he was already a six time all star, had won four Cy Young Awards, and one MVP. If Clemens had retired right then after the 1997 season, before any of the PED’s, he would have been a shoe-in for the hall of fame. Why than, does it make sense to penalize him when he had already earned it? Clemens deserves to be in the hall of fame. Barry Bonds was the same way. He also began using performance-enhancing drugs in 1998, twelve years into his career. By than Bond’s too had already put up hall of fame numbers without the drugs. He won seven Gold Gloves, three MVP’s, and seven Silver Slugger Award’s all before he was accused of using any PED’s. It would be criminal to keep anyone with numbers like that out of the hall of fame and steroid accusations are no reason to start. The two other big names on the ballot, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, are totally different stories.
When looking at the careers of these two, it becomes evident that they would have accomplished very little minus the drugs. Sammy Sosa was a defensive liability before using steroids and was a skinny singles hitter who earned his fame because steroids taught him how to hit home runs. McGwire gives us little to work with before he began using steroids. It was only about the second year of his career that you saw him start to transform into a power hitter in an inorganic way. With these two players there really is nothing but steroids that would have gotten them in to the hall of fame, while many players have other arguments. This is where I challenge you voters to really do your research on each candidate and make a fair judgment, but do not just keep them out because their name and steroids appear in the same
sentence. One of the reasons that we are talking about the players we are talking about is because of how good they were at what they did. There is a reason that not every player caught using steroids put up hall of fame worthy numbers and players like Bonds, Clemens, and McGwire did. There is so much more involved in hitting and pitching that muscle cannot help you with that these players were simply the best at. There are so many mechanical aspects of hitting that a player must perfect in order to just make contact with a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher, let alone be able to square a ball up. The muscles produced by steroids do not kick in during a swing until contact is made. Everything else is entirely on the hitter and some were much better at it than others. If steroids produce homeruns than why did everyone else who used them not hit seventy-three home runs in a season like Bonds did? We need to keep players in or out of the hall of fame based on what they did between the lines, not base our decisions on “what they did in the bathroom” (Greener, 2012). In the end it is performance that matters, and those that were good at it were not just good at it because of steroids, but because they were rare talents that worked hard at what they did. We should not penalize them for that.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame remains one of the most prestigious places in the game of baseball. I understand that many want to protect it’s dignity by keeping those players who “cheated” out, but is that really the best way to do it? Is it really best to keep and entire era of some of the games best players out of the hall of fame? Instead, I propose that we educate the fans about what happened during the steroid era. Leave no story untold. The baseball hall of fame is a history museum, is it not? So why not use this museum to tell the story of the steroid era. Let the players who were accused in and put together an exhibit within the hall that tells their story. Tell the story; say what happened and who was involved and from there, let the people decide what to think. Do not totally shun the players from their ultimate dream. They do not deserve it and neither do the fans.
There is now nothing left to do but leave you to your own thoughts. I have now fully exercised my power to persuade and must now allow you to generate your own opinions. In a sense I feel bad for you. You did not sign up for this. No group of voters has ever had to face a problem such as this. This year and the couple to follow are the most important as well. Your vote this year will set a precedent. It will define an era. Will the steroid era forever go down as a period in baseball to erase from our memory and be embarrassed for, or will it be accepted for what it was? An unfortunate circumstance in which players felt they needed to use steroids in order to keep up with those around them. That unfortunately is for you to decide. Choose wisely.
With Concern, Paul Merolla
Bibliography
Greener, Richard. "Sluggers on Steroids and the Hall Of Fame." The Huffington Post.
TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Nov. 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.
Grush, Loren. "Tommy John Surgery: The next Student Steroid?" Fox News. FOX News
Network, 21 Sept. 2012. Web. 7 Dec. 2012.
Parker, Rob, Stephen A. Smith, and Skip Bayless. "Do Suspected Steroid Users Belong
In Hall Of Fame?" ESPN First Take. ESPN. Bristol, Connecticut, 29 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Dec. 2012. <http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=8690652>.
Smith, Chris. "Why It 's Time To Legalize Steroids In Professional Sports." Forbes.
Forbes Magazine, 24 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2012.
Weiner, Eric. "Report Exposes Extent of Steroid Use in Baseball." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web.
11 Dec. 2012.
ENG 101
Yoshiaki Furui
12/13/12
Summary
My letter to the Baseball Writers Association of America addresses the issue of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball and the induction of accused players into the hall of fame. I argue that no player should be left out of the hall just because of steroids for several reasons. Unfortunately, steroids were a part of the culture of the game during the steroid era and it is about time that we accept that. Baseball is a competitive game in which you need to keep up with those around you in order to keep your job and many players felt steroids were the only solution. Unfortunately, the steroid era has cast a shadow over the game under which no player can …show more content…
go without suspicion whether they have been accused of steroids or not. Also, of those accused, many were on a track to the hall of fame before there is any evidence at all that they started taking steroids and therefore they have a right to a place in the hall. Lastly, we cannot penalize the players for being the best at what they do. It takes a lot more that just the muscle provided by steroids to be successful in the game of baseball and these players have showed us that. Whether or not to allow these players into the hall of fame is one of the toughest decisions ever to face the game of baseball and I can only hope the voters make the correct decision.
An Era to be Forgiven
Dear Members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Today I write you in order to shed some light on an issue that I am sure you all are already thinking about plentifully. It is that time of year again when hall of fame votes are due and I know that you all have a vote. We have recently entered an era in which this task of voting has become more difficult than it has ever been. We have now reached the years in which many of the greatest of players from Major League Baseball’s steroid era will be making an appearance on your ballot. It is you who is charged with making one of the toughest decisions any sports writer has ever been asked to make. The debate will rage on in the world around you but in the end, it is you and only you who can make the decision of whether or not to allow accused steroid users into the National Baseball Hall Fame. What am I doing here?
I am here to speak to you on those player’s behalf’s and to attempt to explain to you that they do belong. No player should be kept out of the hall of fame for the sole reason of steroid use. The steroid era was just that; it was an era that took place and it cannot simply be swept under the rug.
At this point it has become widely reported about, and steroid use in baseball is no longer the secret it once was. It happened and there is little that can be done about it now. There is no sense in us punishing some of the greatest players of the last two decades for the era that they played in. During the 1990’s and early 2000’s steroid use was unfortunately just a part of the game and there was nothing that the players could have done to help it once it began. Even Senator George Mitchell said when he released his report that baseball has a “serious drug culture” (Mitchell, 2007). Steroid use became so widespread in Major League Baseball that it put pressure on those players who were not using the drugs to keep up in any way they …show more content…
could. As we know, baseball is a unique game because unlike many other sports, you cannot sub players in and out throughout the game. There are only nine starting spots to be had and achieving one of them can be an incredibly difficult task in such a competitive league. Than, when you have that spot, you know in the back of your head that there is always going to be that other guy who wants to take that spot from you. There is always someone who wants your job. This competitiveness will lead players to do whatever it takes to stay at the top of their game, even if that means breaking the rules and using performance-enhancing drugs. Especially in the heat of the steroid era when so many people around were using steroids, some players felt they had to in order to keep their job. These men play one of the most competitive games in the world; you cannot penalize them for trying to keep their jobs by doing what everyone else was doing. Steroid use had a ripple effect throughout the game. When more players started using them, it caused even more players to start using them, even if they did not play the same position. During this era, playing the game were some of the best pitchers to ever toe the rubber and it was hard enough for the hitters to keep up. Now say some of those pitchers started to use performance-enhancing drugs and their pitchers start coming in that much harder. It is only logical for some of the games top hitters to say, hey if he is going to cheat than I am too, otherwise I have no chance. It was all just a matter of pure competition between the players in baseball. What makes even less sense about these players being penalized is that it is impossible to know for sure who did what. All of the accusations that have been made are just that. They are accusations. Very few players have actually had it proven that they used performance enhancing drugs. Are there some players with much more evidence built up against them than others? Yes, absolutely, but it cannot just be assumed that every single player whose name has been mentioned with steroids is guilty. Than what about all those players than did not get caught because I guarantee there are tons of them. We will never be able to grasp the full extent of the problem when there are still so many possible users out there who did not get caught, so those who did, are taking all of the blame.
What all of this ignores is all of the great players during the steroid era who were not in fact using steroids. How will their names ever be taken seriously? Can they ever enter the hall of fame without being questioned? It seems to me that because of the steroid problem there will always be a “veil of suspicion” hovering over any player’s head from this era (Smith, 2012). Who is to say that a player being inducted who has never been linked to steroids is not just as guilty as those who have? For instance, Barry Larkin was inducted into the hall of fame just this past summer. Larkin was undoubtedly one of the greatest infielders of all time but one thing he was never considered was a great power hitter. In fact, he never hit more than twenty homeruns in any season, except for in 1996. In 1996, Barry Larkin hit thirty-three homeruns, a miraculous number by his standards, and right in the middle of the steroid era. Am I accusing Larkin of using PED’s? Of course not, he has never faced such accusations, as there is no such evidence. However, simply because of when he played, we are left to wonder, as we are with many players. Letting everyone into the hall would stop such wondering and allow us to honor these men for the great ballplayers that they were. Believe it or not voters, these performance-enhancing drugs are not the only way that players have inorganically enhanced their performance. What about all the other medical procedures that help players get better? Today a player can get eye surgery so that his vision becomes sharper and he can see the ball better out of a pitchers hand. It does not appear that we are doing anything about that form of “cheating.” What about pitchers? When a pitcher throws his arm out these days he undergoes Tommy John surgery after which he is often a better pitcher than he was before. Fox news recently published an article that discuses young pitchers wanting to undergo Tommy John surgery without actual injury because of the enhanced performance post surgery (Grush, 2012). Should we ban all such pitchers because I do not see how surgery is that much different from a drug? Both are medical and both boost your performance. It’s not right. One of the fundamental problems with all of this is that it is only the player’s hall of fame candidacy that is being affected by this problem. Everything else that a player accused of using performance enhancing drugs may have achieved in his career is not being taken from them. You just cannot have it both ways. I agree with what Rob Parker of ESPN says that if you are not going to let them in the hall of fame than the “stats, the wins, the awards, and the championships should not be counted either” (Parker, 2012). It would be a different situation if those caught breaking the rules were punished like they were in other sports. For example, Reggie Bush had to give up his Heisman Trophy when he broke college football rules, and Lance Armstrong had to give up his Tour de France titles when he got caught using PED’s. However in baseball nothing is taken away from the players or teams that get caught. Not to say that I am arguing that the players should be stripped of their achievements because they should not; but, if Major League Baseball is going to let their achievements stand it is hypocritical to tell them that they do not belong in the hall of fame. What is a shame is that you are not allowing some players into the hall of fame because of PED use even though they most likely would have been hall of famers even if they had not used steroids. It is important to look at the facts in cases like this and know exactly when it was that players were caught using PED’s so that a judgment can be made based on what they had done before that point. It is this point that needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis and cannot have a broad blanket thrown over it. For example, let us look at four of the big steroid names appearing on your hall of fame ballot this year. Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire are four players eligible for induction this year and were some of the steroid era’s very best players. First let us take Roger Clemens, one of the most dominant pitchers of the modern era in baseball. Clemens was accused of using PED’s starting in 1998, fourteen years into his major league career. By that point he was already a six time all star, had won four Cy Young Awards, and one MVP. If Clemens had retired right then after the 1997 season, before any of the PED’s, he would have been a shoe-in for the hall of fame. Why than, does it make sense to penalize him when he had already earned it? Clemens deserves to be in the hall of fame. Barry Bonds was the same way. He also began using performance-enhancing drugs in 1998, twelve years into his career. By than Bond’s too had already put up hall of fame numbers without the drugs. He won seven Gold Gloves, three MVP’s, and seven Silver Slugger Award’s all before he was accused of using any PED’s. It would be criminal to keep anyone with numbers like that out of the hall of fame and steroid accusations are no reason to start. The two other big names on the ballot, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, are totally different stories.
When looking at the careers of these two, it becomes evident that they would have accomplished very little minus the drugs. Sammy Sosa was a defensive liability before using steroids and was a skinny singles hitter who earned his fame because steroids taught him how to hit home runs. McGwire gives us little to work with before he began using steroids. It was only about the second year of his career that you saw him start to transform into a power hitter in an inorganic way. With these two players there really is nothing but steroids that would have gotten them in to the hall of fame, while many players have other arguments. This is where I challenge you voters to really do your research on each candidate and make a fair judgment, but do not just keep them out because their name and steroids appear in the same
sentence. One of the reasons that we are talking about the players we are talking about is because of how good they were at what they did. There is a reason that not every player caught using steroids put up hall of fame worthy numbers and players like Bonds, Clemens, and McGwire did. There is so much more involved in hitting and pitching that muscle cannot help you with that these players were simply the best at. There are so many mechanical aspects of hitting that a player must perfect in order to just make contact with a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher, let alone be able to square a ball up. The muscles produced by steroids do not kick in during a swing until contact is made. Everything else is entirely on the hitter and some were much better at it than others. If steroids produce homeruns than why did everyone else who used them not hit seventy-three home runs in a season like Bonds did? We need to keep players in or out of the hall of fame based on what they did between the lines, not base our decisions on “what they did in the bathroom” (Greener, 2012). In the end it is performance that matters, and those that were good at it were not just good at it because of steroids, but because they were rare talents that worked hard at what they did. We should not penalize them for that.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame remains one of the most prestigious places in the game of baseball. I understand that many want to protect it’s dignity by keeping those players who “cheated” out, but is that really the best way to do it? Is it really best to keep and entire era of some of the games best players out of the hall of fame? Instead, I propose that we educate the fans about what happened during the steroid era. Leave no story untold. The baseball hall of fame is a history museum, is it not? So why not use this museum to tell the story of the steroid era. Let the players who were accused in and put together an exhibit within the hall that tells their story. Tell the story; say what happened and who was involved and from there, let the people decide what to think. Do not totally shun the players from their ultimate dream. They do not deserve it and neither do the fans.
There is now nothing left to do but leave you to your own thoughts. I have now fully exercised my power to persuade and must now allow you to generate your own opinions. In a sense I feel bad for you. You did not sign up for this. No group of voters has ever had to face a problem such as this. This year and the couple to follow are the most important as well. Your vote this year will set a precedent. It will define an era. Will the steroid era forever go down as a period in baseball to erase from our memory and be embarrassed for, or will it be accepted for what it was? An unfortunate circumstance in which players felt they needed to use steroids in order to keep up with those around them. That unfortunately is for you to decide. Choose wisely.
With Concern, Paul Merolla
Bibliography
Greener, Richard. "Sluggers on Steroids and the Hall Of Fame." The Huffington Post.
TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Nov. 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.
Grush, Loren. "Tommy John Surgery: The next Student Steroid?" Fox News. FOX News
Network, 21 Sept. 2012. Web. 7 Dec. 2012.
Parker, Rob, Stephen A. Smith, and Skip Bayless. "Do Suspected Steroid Users Belong
In Hall Of Fame?" ESPN First Take. ESPN. Bristol, Connecticut, 29 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Dec. 2012. <http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=8690652>.
Smith, Chris. "Why It 's Time To Legalize Steroids In Professional Sports." Forbes.
Forbes Magazine, 24 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2012.
Weiner, Eric. "Report Exposes Extent of Steroid Use in Baseball." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web.
11 Dec. 2012.