Is the Hall of Fame Already Tainted?

MLB Hall of Fame: A Long History of Inequity

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Many call it the “steroid era”, but as we discussed earlier, we’re discussing much more than steroids, so we’ll call it the “PED era” for more accuracy as we continue through this post.

The PED era was not the first era to have been unequal in baseball because only a certain number of players were keyed into a particular way to help their ability to accrue statistics. In fact, it can be argued that the game has done this in many ways over the years.

Racism. I’m not just talking the color of someone’s skin. When organized baseball leagues first began at the end of the 19th century, teams would actively keep out people of certain descents in their leagues, so you may have a team that intentionally did not want anyone of Irish heritage on their team. This bled into the era of racism that remains perhaps the most definitive black eye on the game that continued until Jackie Robinson broke into the game in 1947. Was Babe Ruth the best hitter of all time, or simply the best white hitter of his era? Was Walter Johnson the best pitcher, or simply the best light-skinned pitcher? We’ll never know if there were a half-dozen guys out there who could have had seasons akin to Babe’s in the same era if they were playing in the league, but the color of their skin kept them out. This continued through two World Wars where players fought alongside men of various races and religions and came back not understanding why the “national pastime” didn’t reflect those who were fighting for the nation.

Greenies. While there is some conjecture that they were out there before World War II, amphetamines, commonly known as “greenies” within the game, became incredibly common after WWII. Players discuss bowls full of these “uppers” sitting right in the middle of the clubhouse and guys grabbing multiple at a time. In fact, legends of the game such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle have all admitted to utilizing greenies in order to be able to play multiple days in a row when they simply were out of energy (and Jim Bouton outed many more players in his “Ball Four” book). Would Mays, Aaron, and Mantle put up the same counting statistics if they had to take more days off due to being exhausted? Greenies in various forms continued through the entire PED era. Amphetamines were banned in 1971, but as we’ll see with steroids, they seemed to assume that the honor system would keep players from using rather than testing. 45 years later (in 2006), they finally began testing players for amphetamines, so there were literally generations of players who used banned stimulants and were never tested that got away with it and likely sit comfortably in Cooperstown.

Recreational drugs. Baseball’s dirty little secret for decades has been the presence of illegal, recreational drugs in the clubhouse. Drugs like heroin were once packaged in pills and sold as pain relievers, and players took them for just that, and got a lot more from them, of course. Marijuana use within the clubhouse to calm nerves and ease anxiety has been common for decades, though players today utilize consumables in the smoke-free modern clubhouse environment whereas their brethren in the 1960s likely could have lit up a joint next to a teammate smoking a cigarette right in the clubhouse. The biggest scandal involving recreational drugs however, came from a drug intended to give the effect of an amphetamine, but to a much higher degree, cocaine. In the 1980s, some pretty big time players were very frequent users of the drug, and it was said that in some clubhouses, training tables would have lines measured out after games as guys were getting treatments. Players like Paul Molitor and Tim Raines have been legally connected to their cocaine use during the decade, and while it certainly didn’t hinder Molitor’s HOF candidacy, there is some undercurrent that it is what some voters are using as reasoning for voting against Raines.

Next: Was All the Offense PEDs?

PEDs. The PED era is considered as from roughly the early 1990s through the mid 2000s. However, anabolic steroids were used by athletes as far back as the 1960s. In fact, Tom House, the former Atlanta Braves pitcher who caught Hank Aaron’s record-breaking home run, admitted to using steroids during his career in the 1970s, so steroids were around for decades before the 1990s even came around. The big change came in 1991, when commissioner Fay Vincent banned steroids in the game. The backlash from owners and players both was so loud and prominent that Vincent actually cited it as a big reason that he resigned the position. More importantly, while amphetamines are available legally through prescription in the United States, steroids were made illegal in the U.S. in 1990, and that changed the method of PED from a steroid to other substances, which is why it is odd to consider the era the “steroid era”. The first iteration of PEDs post-anabolic steroid was synthetic testosterone, but what was found from other sports doing testing at the time is that this raised the testosterone level in a similar way to anabolics. This led to a race (that sadly still continues) to develop the next, great PED that will provide the benefits of enhancing strength and speed while also being undetectable to testing. One of the big ones you hear about now is Human Growth Hormone (HGH), which sounds much more scary than it truly is, but it has honestly not had definitive evidence of any increase in athletic performance in testing that has been done.

So PEDs were likely part of the increase in offense, as were amphetamines, but what other reasons were behind the offensive uptick of the “PED era”? We’ll explore that next.