Steroid era managers benefit from Hall pass
From Richard Griffin’s Bullpen blog, on changes to the Baseball Hall of Fame eligibility rules: Very quietly, there were three amendments to the rules governing the ever-controversial Hall of Fame voting that were announced by the museum’s executive leading into the weekend of celebration at Cooperstown.
The biggest change moving forward is that players will now be allowed a maximum-length presence on the ballot of 10 years, rather than the 15 that they had been granted before, as long as they continued to receive a minimum five per cent of the votes cast. Three players currently with 11 to 15 years on the ballot are grandfathered.
The most recent hall of famer to be voted in during that final five years of eligibility on the ballot was pitcher Bert Blyleven in 2011, entering the hall the same year as Roberto Alomar. Others include Jim Rice and Bruce Sutter. So it is not insignificant, but it will eventually reduce the crowding on the ballot.
I must admit that I was one of the voters that had never included Blyleven on my ballot, due to lack of team success and his won-lost record, until some convincing arguments from sabermetricians in those last few years caused me and others to include him and boost him over the 75 per cent mark.
The first current eligible that the new rule will remove five years earlier than had been believed is Mark McGwire, whose home run exploits in breaking Roger Maris’s single-season mark in 1998 and the riveting chase with Sammy Sosa have since been disgraced in light of his steroid revelations. McGwire is entering his ninth year on the ballot, so instead of remaining eligible until 2021his name will be removed, barring any miraculous growth of support, after the 2016 ballot. Which brings us to one of this year’s inductees, Tony La Russa.
La Russa was one of six new members of the Hall of Fame inducted on Sunday in an emotional, often humorous, sometimes forgetful ceremony on the big lawn in Cooperstown. La Russa is one of three former managers welcomed to the hall, with Joe Torre and Bobby Cox.
La Russa spoke up about PEDs. He has always had a special relationship with McGwire, having managed him as a lanky kid breaking in with the A’s in the late ’80s, then watching him grow and bringing him to St. Louis to key some more of his managerial success as he racked up big win totals, fueling his inclusion this year by the veterans committee. As such, having managed a couple of the game’s biggest juicers in Jose Canseco and McGwire, La Russa told the New York Daily News how he believed that some players from the steroid era should be in and how their inclusion should be handled. “It’s my two cents, but I think you should let them in, but with an asterisk,” La Russa said. “You can’t place these guys ahead of Hank (Aaron) and (Babe) Ruth. It was a bad period. But if a player has Hall of Fame credentials, I think they should be allowed in — a lot of them had Hall of Fame credentials before all this stuff came out.” That last statement, the wording by La Russa, is where I have a problem and always have. Even in the voicing of his support for cheaters, he refuses to really blame the players. Very subtly, he is blaming the media and the investigators, by suggesting players had the credentials before “all this stuff came out.” La Russa has never admitted knowledge. Even with all of the investigations and all the information gathering on the lying and cheating and the use of PEDs uncovered by the Mitchell Report, by those grandstanding U.S. politicians and by reporters, beginning with BALCO, La Russa has never been willing or able to stand up and say that he knew what was going on inside his clubhouse in Oakland in the late ’80s and that he had turned a blind eye. Tony La Russa is a very smart man. He’s trained as a lawyer. Yet he claims he knew nothing. There seems to be a double standard at play. The players from that steroid era can’t seem to get voted in, but the managers in charge of those players can. La Russa is seemingly trying to get the players off on a technicality with an asterisk for being caught. The big problem with the idea of special plaques at Cooperstown is that those we would designate as asterisk-free players weren’t all necessarily PED free.