Steroid stigma may be in decline
Next vote could reveal loosening attitudes toward PED use among retired baseball stars
When the first wave of purported and admitted steroid users began appearing on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot a decade ago, voters rejected them overwhelmingly, no matter their credentials. Drug-tainted sluggers Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro garnered only paltry support, eventually falling off the ballot, while Sammy Sosa could soon meet the same fate. All three boast career statistics that have historically merited induction into the Cooperstown, N.Y., museum.
But when results from this year’s Hall of Fame balloting are announced Wednesday, a far different picture is expected to emerge, one that reflects the voting body’s rapidly loosening attitudes toward performance-enhancing drug use. While none of the biggest names from baseball’s 1990s-2000s doping scandals has made it to Cooperstown, and none likely will make it this time, the day appears to be fast approaching.
This year’s likeliest inductees are longtime Houston Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell and speedy left fielder Tim Raines, with catcher Ivan Rodriguez, who ended his 21-year career with the Washington Nationals, another possible electee. As candidates, all had some drug baggage, as Bagwell and Rodriguez were dogged by suspicions they used PEDs during their careers, and Raines was an admitted cocaine user.
But the most startling development Wednesday will be taking place further down the vote-total list, where Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds — arguably the greatest pitcher and greatest hitter in Major League Baseball history, respectively, but also two of the most recognizable faces of the sport’s doping scandal — are expected to see significant jumps in support, to the point where induction on future ballots, if not in 2018 then soon thereafter, is almost a certainty.
According to the online “BBHOF Tracker” maintained by Ryan Thibodaux, which uses data from Hall of Fame voters who have made their choices public, Bonds and Clemens were polling at 63.4 per cent and 62.4 per cent, respectively, on Monday, with 206 public ballots logged — or just less than half of the expected 440 or so votes from 10-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. (The Washington Post is among the news organizations that does not allow its eligible employees to vote.)
Even if voter support for Bonds and Clemens ultimately falls back in the final totals, as the BBHOF Tracker predicts based on previous years’ voting, their final percentages are expected to represent significant boosts over previous years — accelerating a decisive upward trend that began last year — with both players flipping more than 20 voters who voted “no” last year to “yes” this year.
What has changed? In part, it is a function of the natural shifting of perspective that is built into the voting process, with players not eligible to appear on the ballot until five years after their retirement, but allowed to remain on the ballot in future years as long as their boxes are checked by at least five per cent of voters. With BBWAA members eligible to vote only after 10 years in the organization, some of the newest voters are writers who never covered the game during the so-called steroids era and don’t hold the same rigid viewpoint toward players who doped.
But that shift also got an artificial boost 18 months ago when the Hall of Fame restructured the eligibility requirements for voters to eliminate BBWAA members who hadn’t covered the game regularly within the past 10 years, a move that purged some 200 mostly veteran writers from the rolls and skewed the overall voting pool decisively younger.
Largely as a result, in 2016, the next round of balloting after the change, Clemens and Bonds both saw their support rise by more than seven percentage points (from 36.8 per cent in 2015 to 44.3 per cent in 2016 for Bonds, and from 37.5 to 45.2 for Clemens). This year, both are expected to see an even sharper rise, perhaps into the high 50s — a significant figure, as the vast majority of players who reach 50 per cent eventually gain election.
Though neither Bonds nor Clemens is known to have failed an official drug test, both were linked to PEDs by investigators, and both faced federal charges that they lied about it under oath. Bonds was convicted of obstruction of justice, though the verdict was later overturned, while Clemens was acquitted of perjury and obstruction.
It is difficult to imagine Bonds and Clemens enjoying this level of support among voters 10 years ago, when McGwire’s name first appeared on the ballot, or even six years ago, when Palmeiro’s did. Back then, the voters’ message seemed clear: No one whose career was sullied by steroids would ever reach Cooperstown.
But that is no longer the case. In 2016, Mike Piazza, another player dogged by steroid suspicions during his career, was elected to Cooperstown in his fourth year on the ballot — a development that appears to have had a trickle-down effect, with some hard-line voters suddenly realizing that resistance to the wave of coming steroid-tainted stars is futile.
Bagwell, who, like Piazza, acknowledged taking androstenedione, a steroid precursor, during his career before the drug was banned by MLB, may have benefited most from Piazza’s election. Eighteen voters, at last count, are known to have flipped from “no” to “yes” on his candidacy this year, according to the BBHOF Tracker. But some voters have also used Piazza’s election to open their minds to Bonds and Clemens.
“I simply grew tired of trying to figure out where to draw the line,” said Roch Kubatko, who covers the Baltimore Orioles for MASN.com and who voted for Bonds and Clemens for the first time this year. “Omit only players who failed a PED test? Also include anyone who appeared in a report, or (a player) who simply is hounded by suspicions? ... Am I completely comfortable with my picks? No. But I’ve accepted that there’s no perfect ballot, and I just felt that I no longer could exclude baseball’s all-time home run leader and a guy with seven Cy Young Awards.”
Still, the biggest factor in the sudden jumps in support for Bonds and Clemens appears to have been the election in December of former baseball commissioner Bud Selig, the man who oversaw the game during the steroids era and who, in the minds of many voters, turned a blind eye to the issue. Even though Selig’s election was made by a separate committee tasked with considering players from older eras and non-playing personnel, some voters felt Selig’s election to Cooperstown made it impossible — or at least hypocritical — to shun players such as Bonds and Clemens.
“I always thought it would take a proven user getting in for me to reconsider my stance,” wrote Peter Botte of the New York Daily News in revealing he had switched from “no” to “yes” on Bonds and Clemens this year. “It turns out the impetus was much higher on baseball’s masthead.”
Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle, a past president of the BBWAA, wrote it was “senseless to keep steroid users out when the enablers are in the Hall of Fame. I will now hold my nose and vote for players I believe cheated.”
Ever since McGwire’s first appearance on the ballot in 2006, voters have struggled with how to reconcile a player’s PED use — not to mention the varying degrees of certainty about it — with his career accomplishments. The Hall of Fame itself, in its instructions to voters, provides almost no guidance, other than a vague clause saying “integrity” and “character” are among the attributes to be weighed.
But some voters who craved some sense of clarity on a complicated issue believe they got it with the election of Selig.
“Yes, it gave me some clarity,” Steve Buckley of the Boston Herald, a longtime voter who voted for Bonds and Clemens for the first time this year, said in an interview. “It gave me a reason — you might even say an excuse — to finally vote for Bonds and Clemens.”
But Hall of Famer Andre Dawson, one of 16 voting members of the committee that elected Selig last month in a 15-1 vote, said that election was not meant to signal to BBWAA voters that it was suddenly OK to let in PED users. McGwire, in fact, was also considered by the same committee but received fewer than five votes.
“I don’t think any doors are open,” Dawson said last month. “Somewhere down the line, with the way the game is changing, you never know what’s going to happen. But as a committee, we don’t feel that we’re the ones to make that decision.”
The next three Hall of Fame ballots all contain one slam-dunk, first-ballot inductee, none of whom were tainted by steroid suspicions — which means Bonds and Clemens, assuming their vote totals continue to rise, could find themselves going into Cooperstown in the Class of 2018 along with Chipper Jones, or in the Class of 2019 with Mariano Rivera or the Class of 2020 with Derek Jeter.
What might have once seemed impossible now appears inevitable.