FOUL HALL!
Cooperstown is guilty of hypocrisy and double standards by embracing Babe Ruth but rejecting Barry Bonds
WHENthe Baseball Hall of Fame inducts five new members next Sunday, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will be absent once again, shunned for using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).
And that, according to baseball writer Jay Jaffe, is totally unfair.
Even Babe Ruth reportedly injected himself with an extract derived from sheep testicles in a misguided attempt to boost his skills, writes Jaffe in his new book “The Cooperstown Casebook: Who’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame, WhoShould Be In, and Who Should Pack Their Plaques” (Thomas Dunne Books).
Jaffe argues that the greats of baseball’s PED era — especially Bonds, the sport’s all-time home-run king, and Clemens, one of the greatest pitchers ever — deserve to have their names enshrined at Cooperstown because, among other reasons, many earlier players also did drugs but were still inducted.
“The first known attempt of a ballplayer using a testosterone-based performance enhancer dates back to 1889,” Jaffe writes, “when Pud Galvin, already the first pitcher to reach 300 wins, openly used ‘Brown-Sequard Elixir’ via subcutaneous injection.”
This elixir claimed to “impede the aging process and boost strength and virility.” It was developed using “an extract from monkey testicles,” and was soon regarded as a rip-off.
Still, Galvin’s use of it was not just open but encouraged.
“If there still be doubting Thomases who concede no virtue to the elixir,” wrote The Washington Post at the time, “they are respectfully referred to Galvin’s record in yester- day’s Boston-Pittsburgh game.”
Galvin was elected to the Hall of Fame by baseball’s Veterans Committee in 1965, with no hand-wringing over what he might have injected into his body. The latter can also be said for Ruth, even if his injection of the extract from sheep testicles in 1925 led to “an ulcer that required surgery and cost him the first 41 games of the season.” (The Yankees told the media that Ruth had a “bellyache.”)
“Those isolated incidents underscore the fact that PEDuse by baseball players evolved over decades within a culture of both competitiveness and permissiveness,” writes Jaffe.
MORE damning is that amphetamine use was widespread in baseball from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Pills known as greenies —“used to fight fatigue and gain physical and mental edges” — were “widely available” in clubhouses.
“Hall of Famers from Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron to Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench, Willie Stargell, and Frank Thomas have been connected to amphetamines, some by their own accounts, and they were hardly alone,” writes Jaffe.
“We generally don’t wring our hands about their usage — which helped keep players in the lineup and closer to the tops of their games — both because the pills were commonplace and because there were no real deterrents in place, even after these drugs were regulated via the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.”
Even steroids themselves, basically the same drugs considered the scourge of baseball over the past two decades, were used openly prior to that period. A former pitcher named Tom House told a reporter that performance-enhancing drugs “were widespread in the game in the 1960s and ’70s,” Jaffe writes.
“‘We were doing steroids they wouldn’t give to horses,’ he said, estimating that six or seven pitchers per team were experimenting with steroids or human growth hormone. ‘We didn’t get beat, we got out-milligrammed. And when you found out what they were taking, you started taking them.’”
By the turn of the millennium, the use of PEDs in baseball was shockingly high. In a 2002 Sports Illustrated cover story, 1996 National League MVP Ken Caminiti pegged the percentage of major leaguers using steroids to “at least half.” Former outfielder Chad Curtis gave a figure of “40-50 percent,” while Jose Canseco, who would later name steroid users in his memoir, claimed it was closer to 85 percent.
In 2004, players started getting tested for substances; those who transgressed were dealt fines and suspensions, but their records never suffered a dent. No player suspended for PEDs “has had his statistics disavowed or expunged,” Jaffe writes, and “none has been banned for life for his offense” with just one exception (Mets pitcher Jenrry Mejia, banned in 2016 after his third positive test for PEDs).
Bonds, for example, still holds the official record for most lifetime home runs (762) and is still fully eligible to participate in baseball in any capacity. Why then, Jaffe reasons, should Hall of Fame voters treat him as if he’s ineligible?
Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron have been connected to amphetamines . . . and they y were hardly alone.
ACCORDING to Hall voters, the reason is simple: morals.
In a 2001 interview, whenasked how Hall of Fame voters should treat the likes of Bonds and Clemens, Hall president Jeff Idelson referred to the “character clause” — a rule that demands “voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”
But this rule was cointroduced in 1944 by a man whose own values were questionable, notes Jaffe. He describes then-Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis as “a man so brimming with integrity, sportsmanship and character that he spent his 24-year tenure upholding the game’s color line.”
In fact, several executives in the Hall of Fame tried to keep baseball white, including “Cap Anson, who was instrumental in drawing [the color line] back in the 1880s; Landis; Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, whose franchise didn’t integrate until 1959; [and] Yankees general manager George Weiss, whose team didn’t integrate until 1955.”
Some Hall of Fame players were even reportedly members of the KKK.
“‘Rogers Hornsby and Tris Speaker, fellow stars from the old Confederate states, told methey were members of the KuKlux Klan,’ wrote [sportswriter] Fred Lieb in his 1977 memoir, ‘Baseball As I Have Known It.’ ‘I do not know whether [Ty] Cobb was a Klansman, but I suspect he was.’”
Thenthere are Hall memberswho’ve allegedly threatened or beaten women. Amongthese: “Roberto Alomar (accused of pushing and threatening his wife with a knife in 2010), Bobby Cox (arrested for punching his wife in 1995) and Kirby Puckett (charged with false imprisonment, criminal sexual conduct and assault of one woman in 2001; accused of threatening his wife with a gun and attempting to strangle her in ’03).”
Several Hall of Famers have also been associated with illegal drug use — Jaffe mentions Ferguson Jenkins, Paul Molitor, and Tim Raines, all of whom were either implicated in or admitted to cocaine use.
Nor did widespread cheating harm the cases of the sport’s most notorious “spitballers and other ball defacers, such as Gaylord Perry (who confessed to using saliva, mud, sweat, Vaseline, and K-Yjelly), Don Sutton (nicknamed ‘Black and Decker’ for his use of sandpaper and other items), and Whitey Ford (who used his wedding ring to cut baseballs and also employed a ‘gunk’ mixture of baby oil, turpentine and resin).”
BASEBALL only started coming to terms with the PED problem in the mid-aughts, when former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell led a commission to investigate the scope of the problem. While writing that player-users were “responsible for their actions,” he also noted that “they did not act in a vacuum.”
“Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades — commissioners, club officials, the Players Association and players — shares to some extent in the responsibility for the steroids era. There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on. As a result, an environment developed in which illegal use became widespread.” Mitchell also concluded that the best course of action moving forward was “amnesty for the players named,” to keep the focus on prevention.
As it happens, Hall of Fame voters have been coming around to Jaffe’s conclusion for several years. In 2017, Clemens, winner of a record seven Cy Young Awards and holder of the thirdhighest strikeout total in baseball history, received 54.1 percent of the vote. Bonds, with his record seven MVP awards and both the single-season and all-time home run records, got 53.8. In both cases, it was their highest percentage to date, in their fifth year of eligibility.
Theinduction requirement is 75 percent, and players have 10 years to get there before being dropped from the ballot. Jaffe hopes that for Bonds and Clemens, that magic number is just around the corner. “WhenPED-tainted players have come up for election to the Hall of Fame, they and a small handful of others — some with far moretenuous connections to PEDs— have been left to carry the weight for an entire era,” Jaffe writes.
“It shouldn’t be that way.”