The Steroid No Vote

Ian Crouch:

This year, the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York, had its first real opportunity to confront the implications of the game’s two-decade run of performance-enhancing drugs—and perhaps nudge the sport toward some kind of wider reëvaluation of its recent past. But a definitive answer to the questions raised by the steroid era will have to wait until at least next year: the sportswriters of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, who vote on the nominees, have elected no one for the class of 2013 from a ballot that included, for the first time, such statistical safe-bets as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, Sammy Sosa, and Craig Biggio. It’s the first time since 1996 that the writers have failed to enshrine a single player—to find another example, you have to go back to 1971. Biggio, who is well regarded, got votes from sixty-eight per cent of the writers (each of whom is allowed to tab up to ten players), missing the seventy-five per cent threshold for induction, but he seems likely to get in next year. Jack Morris (sixty-seven per cent) and Tim Raines (fifty-two per cent), who have been on the ballot for years, are heading in the right direction as well. As for the more high-profile stars, well, that might be harder. While each voter submits an independent ballot, the totals, taken together, do seem to represent a collective shrug from the writers, a desire to delay the reckoning about players who live on in the record books and remain in good standing in the eyes of Major League Baseball, but who’ve been tainted by what they did to their bodies, or what they are accused of doing, or what their peers did, or what those in charge of baseball failed to do.

While I'm sure Barry Bonds used steroids, has anybody ever had a better string of four seasons in a row.  And while Roger Clemens is both an asshole and a user of performance-enhancing drugs, he's still one of the best pitchers of all-time.  So we don't have the all-time hit king (my guy Pete), the all-time home run king or a pitcher who is ranked 9th all-time in wins (and second by one win amongst pitchers who have been active in my lifetime) in the Baseball Hall of Fame?  That seems to distract from the attraction of the place.