Posted by sean on November 26, 2013
2014 Official Hall of Fame Ballot w/ Stats & JAWS Measures.
Just a one-stop area for your HOF ballot needs. Thanks to Jay Jaffe of SI.com for the use of his JAWS numbers on our site.
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How come guys like Bagwell and Piazza get a pass on steroids?
"How come guys like Bagwell and Piazza get a pass on steroids?"
Because no one has found any credible evidence linking them to steroids outside of rumor and innuendo. And if that's enough to keep you out of the HOF then pretty much no one who's career was centered in the 90's & early 00's will ever get in.
Echoing Hartvig, I'm pretty sick of those two getting lumped in with the rest. While we can't categorically say they didn't, if you look at a lot of the guys who have been popped, they're not exactly giant power hitters. Of course the obvious are, but Cervelli from last year, Brian Roberts from the Mitchell Report, Bartolo Colon who is just fat, etc. are not. Bags and Piazza are innocent until proven guilty (or at least strongly implicated).
And the flip side, McGriff gets screwed. Why are we only looking at the guys who cheated and not the guys who we assume didn't? He had a HOF career based up on pre-late 90s numbers and just happened to play into the steroid era. He also tailed off in production the way guys in their late 30s and 40s are supposed to. That's a crime, dog. Ok that was dumb.
Re: 'How come some guys get a pass?'
Is it fair if/when ever juicers bump 'clean' guys? is a question I understand. Examples always include particular names, and essentially three categories of players in this epic: 'proven' juicers; suspected juicers; and, 'I know' he's clean/'never-did-anything'. How do you know anyone is clean? Even a guy who prevails in a court of law a 'proven' juicer? Is a PED, for some voters' hall-of-fame-voting purposes, a substance banned by MLB at the time the player took it? or banned now?
What's I really write in to ask, on this subject (of free passes) is:
How come guys who evidently refused to hire/work-with particular men on bases of color/race get a free pass? Class of 2013 had an owner who hired alot of guys, not one of them non-white, I don't think.
Would that be a case of 'proven' discrimination? Suspected? Clean (visible indications result of coincidence rather than misdeed)? Though such discrimination would be punished now, if caught, it wasn't against the law, at the time this owner 'played'.
I mean, at the time in history when this owner ran, 'everyone was doing it'. I hope I need not say that 'customary racism' of the 19th and 20th centuries eroded historical integrity more than any chemical substance could.
There are players in HOF who have, if I am not mistaken, been convicted though the judicial system, in connection with possession of controlled substance/s and were nevertheless elected, at least one guy by the writers.
I'm not talking about not accounting for situations where a player has been disciplined by MLB. If a guy is officially banned from baseball, this is a different situation, because (if for no other reason) there is precedent for excluding him from HOF.
It is unprecedented to exclude a guy when MLB has never rendered any kind of judgment regarding any conduct. And it's unprecedented, in HOF and in law generally, to punish a guy for doing something that was not against the rules when he played.
Baseball is an old game, and it has some stains, noticeable in different lights, on players, executives, entire eras. I'm not sure that anything we have here with PEDs in recent decades in that new, in a sense, nor warrants any departure from the precedent described.
@ Dan, I'm a Cards fan, and I know McGwire used them when he was with the Cards, but the one difference is, the ones he used, were not banned by MLB at the time. They are now, but they weren't when he was using them. I also agree with you, he had HOF numbers before and kinda tailed off like older players usually do late in their 30s and 40s. Piazza I have never heard being linked to steroids. This is news to me, even if it is just a rumor.
If McGwire used steroids as a Cardinal, they were most certainly banned by MLB, and had been since Commissioner Bowie Kuhn's decree in 1971, when the first formal MLB Drug Policy was announced. Quoting Kuhn: Baseball personnel must "comply with federal and state drug laws."
This dictum was reiterated by Fay Vincent in 1991, and again by Bud Selig in 1997.
Greenies before 1971? Legal for ballplayers, as far as the Commissioner's Office was concerned. Non-prescription steroids, HGH, etc. since 1971? All banned.
I would like to know why Curt Schilling is never/hardly mentioned in the discussion of steroid abusers. Look at his stats, his 3 best years were all after he turned 34 years old. Almost half his total wins and career WAR total were earned after that age also. He played on a team that possibly had some of the most notorious abusers in the game...Steve Finley, Luis Gonzalez, Matt Williams & Jay Bell. Schilling was also coming off a poor year in 2000 at the age of 33 when most players are on their downward spiral of their career. The evidence is circumstantial but I think it makes a very strong case that Mr Schilling joined in the crowd on that Arizona team.
"If McGwire used steriods as a Cardinal." There is no "if" he DID use steriods when he hit those homers in 1998. He admitted this in a interview with Bob Costas.
But what is it about you guys that whenever baseball comes up we suddendly have to have diatribes about steriods?
Why can't a player have some of his best years when he is relatively older, without being accused of using steroids and other PEDs? Hank Aaron (born Feb. 1934), from the ages of 35 to 39 (1969-1973), hit 203 home runs in 2,399 at bats. That is an average of just over 40 home runs per year and during this period in his late 30's he hit one home run every 11.8 at bats. This is substantially better than his overall lifetime production of one home run every 16.4 at bats (755 home runs in 12,364 lifetime at bats) and his production of one home run every 17.4 at bats before his 35th birthday (510 home runs in 8,889 at bats).
Had Aaron maintained his pre-1969 home run production after the age of 35, he would have hit only 137 home runs over the 1969-73 time period instead of 203, leaving him with only 647 home runs at the end of the 1973 season (his last season before turning 40) instead of 713.
Thus, he would have not caught Ruth without his substantial late-career boost in home run production.
When Hank was a young player, he likely learned something from his elder teammate Warren Spahn about how to be a productive player in his late 30's and early 40's. While Spahn was a pitcher and Aaron was not, they both shared the characteristic of high productivity after the age of 35.
Spahn won 20 or more games every year from 1956 (age 35) until 1963 (age 42) except for one year when he won 18. His ERA over that period was less than 3.00. His season at age 42 in 1963 (23-7, 2.60 ERA, 1.117 WHIP) was perhaps his best season of that period and was clearly surpassed by only one season before the age of 35 (1953 at age 32, 23-7, 2.10 ERA, 1.058 WHIP).
What was Spahn doing in his late 30's and early 40's to maintain such a high level of productivity? He must have stopped doing that after the 1963 season, because he declined markedly in 1964 (age 43) and played one more season in 1965 before retiring.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/spahnwa01.shtml
OK, well Sammy Sosa claims he was clean. Sammy has out-of-this-world numbers and without rumors and such he should be in the HoF.
Ken...you can throw in Babe Ruth to your argument also as he continued to have great years through the age of 38. But adding him to your argument doesn't help as those are 3 of the greatest players/pitchers in the history of baseball. Check out Curt Schilling's stats up until the age of 33, no one would consider him an all time great or even one of the better pitchers while he played as he had only made 1 top 10 in Cy Young vote and 3 all-star teams. His statistics dramatically improved from age 34 on, that's what makes him a suspected steroid user (at least in my mind).
Also, not sure if your a big believer of the WAR statistic (can't say I've converted yet) but if you are, you'll notice the Top 4 WAR years of both Aaron and Spahn were all before they turned 34. So even though they continued to be very productive, their overall stats declined, unlike Schilling who's Top 3 WAR scores were achieved after he turned 34, which I would guess is very unusual.
The JAWS measures are nice and all, but there needs to be some serious tinkering with the way it calculates relievers.
It just takes all their career, not differentiating between starting and relieving, which obviously skews the numbers towards those who did decently as starters (Eckersley, Wood, etc.) And it just makes the pure relievers look bad.