Is It Time To Fix Baseball's Hall?
Cooperstown's Baseball Hall of Fame missing some notables
No, I’m not upset that Ichiro Suzuki wasn’t a unanimous choice for the Baseball Hall of Fame. If Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron and many others weren’t unanimous choices, I think Suzuki will get over one guy not voting him in.
Billy Wagner, C.C. Sabathia and Suzuki will join Dave Parker and Dick “Don’t call me Richie” Allen in this summer’s Hall of Fame induction. They were all terrific players and deserving of the honor.
But, as I get older and my view of the game gets wider (especially having written
”Diamond Duels” — out March 4 — a deep dive into the actual matchups of these heroes in their glory days,) it’s the absences from Cooperstown that I wonder about.
You know their names. EVERY baseball fan knows their names. Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriquez, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Manny Ramirez, Jose Canseco, Rafael Palmiero — players implicated with steroids or in Pete’s case, gambling. They were the best of their time. But they cheated.
Keeping them out of the Hall, at least at this point, is their punishment. But you cannot tell the story of baseball — which, after all, is the inarguable point of the Baseball Hall of Fame — without these players. While it’s not as if the Hall doesn’t acknowledge them — there’s a great big display with stuff from the great Sosa-McGwire home run duel, Jose Canseco’s jersey and there’s Pete Rose stuff there, too — it’s not the same thing, is it?
Those golden plaques, the shrine part of the Hall, have been denied them. And maybe that’s the right thing to do. But is right forever?
I made peace with the case of Pete Rose. Yes, I absolutely agree that he should have been banned for betting on baseball while managing the Cincinnati Reds. Had he been inducted, his plaque, of course, should have spelled out the tawdry details of his lifetime ban. I devoted a whole chapter in “Diamond Duels” to the Rose case and after giving it a lot of thought, I thought it was time for baseball to forgive him. He had paid his debt, in my view. And had he been inducted, there’s no doubt in my mind it would have drawn the largest, most vociferous crowd in Cooperstown history.
At this pivotal point in the game’s history, with baseball itself losing much of its charming subtleties in what has become an either/or daily duel, a home run or a strikeout, they need to think of the fans. A whole generation of new baseball fans who were hooked on the McGwire-Sosa-Griffey Home Run Summer of 1998 are now told it was a lie, a mirage. Would it be so awful for baseball, collectively, to forgive them, to bring all these miscreants back into the Baseball Hall of Fame family? The stories of their misdeeds are all out there, have been for years.
The game wasn’t always covered the way it is now; teams used to pay for meals and travel expenses for sportswriters, they traveled together on trains. Games were played during the day. Players had the whole night to get themselves into trouble. We’ve all heard the story of a nude Babe Ruth being chased by a woman with a knife the length of a Pullman car, a tale that didn’t make the dailies. There’s plenty more we don’t know and never will. A scrupulous examination of everyone already in the Hall could be embarrassing. And if we think steroids (or something similar) is out of the game for good, well, I strongly suspect we just haven’t found a way to catch them yet.
Don’t we have to think down the road just a little bit? Take a close look at the 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. Ryan Braun a Hall of Famer? Shin-Soo Choo? Nick Markakis? Daniel Murphy? Gio Gonzalez? Neil Walker? Really? Boy, there’s a vote I’m looking forward to. Isn’t name recognition, star quality going to be important?
I’m not making excuses for those cheaters. It gave them a distinct advantage over the course of an endless baseball season and it made a mess of baseball’s record books. Brady Anderson 50 home runs in a season? How many 60 HR seasons were there?
But the steroid era was a part of baseball history. Just like the fixed 1919 World Series and the ban of African-American players until 1947. I think it’s a safe bet that there are players already in the Hall who used performance-enhancing drugs. I don’t know that it makes it a purer, better Hall the way it stands now. Maybe it does.
I’m wondering if it’s time — while these players are still around and more importantly, the fans who loved and lived for these players are still here and still care — to acknowledge what they did but forgive them. And make the Hall of Fame inclusive for those who earned it by what they did ON THE FIELD.
John Nogowski’s new baseball book “Diamond Duels,” a deep-dive into the historic matchups in baseball history, will be released on March 4. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
AN INSIDE LOOK AT ‘DIAMOND DUELS’
