SUSPICION? SO WHAT!
PED allegations — or even confirmed usage — shouldn’t taint Cooperstown inclusion
“CAN I just ask you why?” Jeff Bagwell asked a small group of reporters Thursday afternoon at a Manhattan news conference to celebrate his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bagwell, the Astros slugger who spent seven years on the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot before receiving his good-news phone call Wednesday, reacted when a writer told him, honestly and correctly, that suspicion surrounded him on the issue of illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
I found Bagwell’s question fair, if perhaps intentionally obtuse, so I offered him an answer. While I voted for him each of his seven years, I said, the concerns over his drug usage surfaced primarily due to his body size and the fact that he didn’t hit many home runs in the minor leagues — six in 731 at-bats — before crushing 449 homers in 7,797 big league atbats.
“Don Mattingly didn’t, either,” Bagwell said of the Yankees icon, who went deep 37 times in 1,842 minor league at-bats and then 222 times in 7,003 big league at-bats.
Eh. That’s not a great comeback, if you crunch the numbers; Bagwell’s disparity is far more glaring. But these sort of uncomfortable exchanges are and should be the norm now. The election line has moved significantly in two years and it’s set to make another giant leap over the next five years. Call it What Mike Wrought. “No. I didn’t think like that,” Bagwell said, when I asked him whether he knew he’d get in once Mike Piazza passed the 75 percent threshold for election last year. “I was happy for Mike. I told everybody around, ‘I don’t want Mike Piazza up in a big situation. I don’t want to see him.’
“I met Mike a long time ago when he won Rookie of the Year. I saw him in the weight room after a game. I came back to the clubhouse and said, ‘We’re all in trouble, man. This kid gets it.’ And he’s in the Hall of Fame.”
Piazza’s induction into the Hall of Fame, in his fourth year of eligibility, opened up Cooperstown for the “Guilty by suspicion” group. Everyone wondered how in the heck a 62nd-round draft pick by the Dodgers, who selected him only as a favor to their manager (and Piazza’s longtime family friend) Tommy Lasorda, turned into the best-hitting catcher in the game’s history. No one publicly determined where, and from whom, Piazza might have acquired illegal PEDs.
Bagwell falls into that same group: Lots of understandable, general theorizing and no public evidence.
“I’m just like, ‘ Where is the information from? Because I worked out?’ ” said Bagwell, who has repeatedly denied illegal PED usage. “It was ridiculous.”
Ivan Rodriguez joined Bagwell as a class of 2017 member, in his first year on the ballot, despite Jose Canseco writing in his 2005 autobiography “Juiced” that he personally injected Pudge with steroids while they were teammates with the Rangers.
“No I didn’t,” Rodriguez said Thursday, when asked explicitly whether he used illegal PEDs. “I was a player that played the game the right way. … I was a very good, disciplined player. I worked hard to do my best that I could. I loved the game of baseball.”
I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that either player used illegal PEDs. And I wouldn’t think any less of them if confirmation of such allegations emerged. Illegal PED usage doesn’t rank even among the game’s 10 top scandals. It’s an intramural player matter and nothing more.
Up next: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, whose support has increased each of the last two years even though hard evidence of their usage exists. On Thursday, Bagwell repeated the endorsements of the Steroids-Era Scapegoats duo that he voiced Wednesday.
“I played in the era that we played in. It was fun,” Bagwell said. “Obviously, things got a little out of control there for a little bit.”
The real test for these guys won’t come when they meet the media. It’ll arrive when they’re hanging out privately with their fellow Hall members, many of them judgmental, on induction weekend next July. Oh, to be a fly — a fly delighted that such awkward moments have come to fruition — on that wall.