No, You Made It Awkward: On Steroid-Era Players and the Hall of Fame

Back in January, in a Facebook group devoted to the Effectively Wild podcast, one post noted how uncomfortable it would be if Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The poster discussed how the day in Cooperstown would be filled with awkward speeches, loud anti-PED rhetoric, and claims the Hall would be debased by their presence. But awkwardness is not an excuse. If the Pro Football Hall of Fame can enshrine Ray Lewis without a hitch, baseball can do something similar.

Baseball’s history is littered with greats who, if they were elected to the Hall of Fame today, would produce equally uncomfortable weekends, speeches and sentiments. Baseball, like America, tends to sanitize its history and mark acts of evil as “unfortunate.” In the social media age, some of the following players would have made Sunday in Cooperstown just as awkward.

So, do we buy these arguments, and why or why not, as the case may be?

Trump backs Pete Rose reinstatement in wake of Astros sign-stealing scandal

Of course, he does.

Pete Rose uses Astros saga to ask for reinstatement

In a petition sent to the MLB commissioner’s office and obtained by ESPN, Rose and his lawyers argue that Manfred has recently opted not to punish players guilty of major game-changing rules infractions and, as a result, should end Rose’s 30-½ year ban for gambling on baseball while he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds. The lawyers say that Rose’s lifetime ban is “vastly disproportionate” when compared to MLB’s punishments of players who took steroids and the players involved in the sign-stealing schemes by the 2017 Houston Astros.

“There cannot be one set of rules for Mr. Rose and another for everyone else,” Rose’s 20-page petition for reinstatement says. “No objective standard or categorization of the rules violations committed by Mr. Rose can distinguish his violations from those that have incurred substantially less severe penalties from Major League Baseball.”

MLB Ineligible List Ends at Death for Banned Players

So there’s this minor kerfuffle about how maybe Joe Jackson can get into the hall now, because MLB has this new rule that you’re removed from the ineligible list when you die.  Except here’s the quote from ESPN’s source:

“From our perspective, the purpose of the ineligible list is a practical matter,” the source told ESPN. “It’s used to prevent someone from working in the game. When a person on the ineligible list passes away, he’s unable to work in the game. And so for all practical purposes, we don’t consider a review of the status of anyone who has passed away.”

Which sounds to me like it means that you don’t get removed.  Jackson is banned, and they stopped reviewing his case after he’s dead - which means that he stays banned.

Pete Rose feels Astros’ cheating worse than his bets, questions players getting off ‘scot-free’

Pete Rose still has that same perky passion in his voice even though he’ll turn 79 in April, especially when he’s talking about his favorite subject while signing autographs “five hours a day, 20 days a month” near his Las Vegas home.

More than 30 years after being served a lifetime ban from baseball for betting on his team, Rose loves bragging about winning two World Series in the 1970s with the Big Red Machine and another with the 1980 Phillies after “Mike Schmidt went from being the best player four days a week to seven with me in Philly.” Baseball’s all-time hits leader also will detail why he believes Dave Parker and Steve Garvey belong in the Hall of Fame, and how he’s still hoping to get in before he’s “10 feet under.”

“All I do is talk positive about the game of baseball to customer after customer after customer,” Rose told NJ Advance Media on Monday during a lengthy phone interview. “I don’t badmouth the game, so now I’m going to have to try to defend the Houston Astros for the next two months on what they did.“

Rose was kidding.

Mind you, his commentary here would be a lot more meaningful if we had any confidence in his integrity…..