Election to Hall past due for Bagwell
All’s well that ends well for Jeff Bagwell, one of the greatest hitters of his or any other generation, who will finally enter the Hall of Fame in 2017 in his seventh year of eligibility.
But there was never a good case against Bagwell entering Cooperstown, and it’s something of a travesty that it took this long. Bagwell finished his career with an excellent .948 on-base-plusslugging percentage — 22nd best in MLB history among qualifiers. His 79.6 career Wins Above Replacement tops even that of hit king Pete Rose, and, in fact, the only eligible position player with a higher career total in that stat who isn’t yet enshrined in the Hall of Fame is Barry Bonds (and Bonds will likely get in soon).
Like Mike Piazza before him, Bagwell’s induction was almost certainly delayed by a largely unsubstantiated whisper campaign associating him with the performance-enhancing drug use that permeated the sport in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The evidence of Bagwell’s indiscretion: He was a burly dude who hit tons of homers in the era we now associate with steroids use, and he didn’t hit many homers in his two seasons in the minors. Forget the fact that young players are typically expected to flash more power as their bodies fill out: Bagwell, for having the audacity to hit lots of homers in the late 1990s, was assumed by many to be a performance-enhancing drug user and thus deemed unworthy of Cooperstown, which is already filled with drunks, wife beaters and racists.
Bagwell has always insisted he never used illegal performance enhancers, but few besides Bagwell can know if that’s true. What matters is that it shouldn’t matter: For one thing, Major League Baseball did not do anything to police PED use during Bagwell’s heyday, and its steward at the time — then-commissioner Bud Selig — will enter the Hall alongside Bagwell this summer.
For another, the guilty-untilproven-innocent standards imposed upon certain players of the era — Bagwell and Piazza perhaps foremost among them — seem arbitrarily applied.
Yes, the Hall of Fame criteria includes a morality clause and, yes, many players who played during Bagwell’s era broke rules that were not yet enforced. But we will never really know which ones did and did not.
Nor will most of us ever be able to say how we might have faced the ethical dilemma then presented to big-league ballplayers: Take a drug that might help me earn more money for my family and help my team win more games or use only the supplements and surgeries deemed OK by the majors and risk losing both playing time and compensation to my performance-enhancing colleagues.
The election of Bagwell, and that of Piazza before him, helps establish a good precedent for Hall of Fame elections and one that should be welcome to all of us who’d prefer the Hall of Fame serve as a living monument to baseball instead of a Colonial Williamsburg-esque tribute to some better bygone era that never really existed.
Suspicions alone should never have kept anyone out of Cooperstown, and presumably they will not from here on out.