[Pictured: The man Tony La Russa says “screams integrity,” Mark McGwire]
While much of the baseball world focused this week on the incremental gains in votes that brought Jim Rice and Andre Dawson closer and closer to the Hall of Fame finish line, one player is watching his votes shrink faster than his own testes on steroids. That would be Mark McGwire. Even the Cards’ own web site notes that “McGwire received 118 votes in results announced Monday, good for 21.9 percent — a drop from 128 votes in each of his first two years on the ballot.” Tony La Russa, who managed McGwire with the A’s and Tards, and had no idea about steroids, made the following argument for McGwire’s inclusion:
“This steroid issue, that’s a matter of integrity,” La Russa said. “That’s one way to describe it, right? Well, it occurred to me, I know that I’ve never spoken much about it at all, but this guy did something that screams integrity. … He had a contract in his hand for $15 million over two years, and he walked away from it because he didn’t feel like he could play to that level. That, to me, there’s a certain integrity for the sport, for self-respect and everything.”
As paper thin as that argument is, nothing beats Lowell Cohn of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat who trashes every other Hall of Famer of the past 50 years with his argument that everybody cheats, so why not vote in McGwire. That is, the Hall isn’t about ethics, so who cares how the player got in? In totally conflating the ancient Stats v Off-The-Field Morality debate that we’ve heard since Ty Cobb, Cohn twists it to the point where cheating on the field (assuming using steroids was cheating) is now a valid way into the Hall. Did I mention he actually calls his blog The Cohn Zone? Says Cohn:
In the 1970s and 1980s players used amphetamines, commonly known as greenies. Major League Baseball was a greenies drug lab. Everyone knows that. Players from that era were edgy and ornery and rude. I used to think it was because they didn™t go to college or maybe they came up through the minor leagues. I had all kinds of theories which I now believe were ridiculous. Many players from that era were half-crazed because they prepared for games by popping greenies. It was the prevailing baseball culture, end of story.
And that means great players like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron who played into the 1970s, and even Rickey Henderson, may have used amphetamines. Am I accusing those three Hall of Famers of cutting ethical corners? Absolutely not. Am I saying they definitely did not use greenies? Absolutely not. I am saying it™s impossible to know one way or another.
I also am saying if it was wrong for a player to use performance-enhancing drugs in the 1990s, it also was wrong for a player to get up for a game with amphetamines in the 1970s. There are no degrees of wrongness ” both are wrong, both are cheating, both stink.
If you want to ban McGwire, you also must ban superstar players from the prior era who freely used uppers.
Prosecutors everywhere should be thankful The Genius chose to pursue a dual career as baseball manager/high profile box wino rather than practicing law. With those dual powers of persuasion and analysis he could bring the legal system to a grinding halt.
After a couple of more catastrophic seasons in St Louis, look for him to “retire” and replace Steff McKee on Boston Legal.
Until I see someone mount the same high horse on “player’s coffee” abuse that folks proudly ride whenever steroids are mentioned, any and all sub-informed righteous indignation re: who sticks or swallows or applies what, and how it allows whomever to hit or throw something really hard, and what that says about one’s integrity, should be put down for its own good.
I’m actually half-serious, too.
The amazing thing to me about Cohn is that he actually gets a vote in the Hall of Fame and I (and you) don’t. Because he writes for the “Santa Rosa Press Democrat?” If his kind of reasoning is informing a vote, I’d like to see the balloting a) opened up to grade schoolers, or b) making Hall voters pass some kind of baseball knowledge exam. The Hall actually determines a lot of baseball history, and the idea of it done democratically by guys like this is a little disconcerting — assuming you take baseball voting seriously at all. A bigger concern to the nation, Cohn can actually vote in real elections, too, as stupidity is not considered a felony.
The McGuire thing is far and away the most ridiculous thing about the Hall voting, and potentially about baseball in general. The same writers that are keeping him out are the writers who conveniently ignored the whole episode and counted home runs through 1998. Any of them who babble about integrity ought to answer for their own lack of journalistic integrity for failing to report key factors as the game made its resurgence.
The only one who got up before congress and didn’t lie (in English) is McGuire. After taking the game on his shoulders and bringing it back from unfortunate parody, it would have been a bit much for him to have gone up there and admitted to the drugs, but he couldn’t lie either. He just didn’t want to talk about it.
Ever the opportunists, the dinosaurs in old journalism (and by that I mean Bob Costas) are obscuring their key role in the fraud perpetrated on baseball fans by shaming a player who was effectively their meal ticket. This figures to be sickening for quite some time.
If it is true that prescription speed was in widespread use in MLB in the 70s, doesn’t Genghis Cohn have a point about the 90s?
I don’t know if the claim is true. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, and I would have a hard time discerning any ethical difference between its use and the use of juice.
(My definition of ethically sound athletic competition is competition free of PEDs, player/manager gambling, collusion, and a tiny-assed Chuck Meriwether strike zone.)
I don’t have a problem with the Hall changing their voting criteria over time, either. It’s the league that let/forced them become the ultimate arbiters of the impact of PEDs on player laudability, so if it takes them a few decades to figure out how to deal with that passed buck, so be it.
Ben–
The more transparency attains in HOF voting, the more vividly the horrorshow comes into focus. Woody Paige wrote that column a couple of years ago FJM covered (can’t find it on their site right now but you probably read it) where he was saying things like “I’m voting for Don Mattingly because he was a friend of mine” and “Goose Gossage once spoke to me for 30 minutes when I was a young reporter” and “Dale Murphy played a few games for the Rockies so he gets my vote”.
It’s a sick farce but just when I’m past it all they put in Rice and leave out Dawson and I’m sucked into caring enough to complain again.
I should say, McGwire’s not the issue for me. I think he probably does deserve to get in, depending on the real issue, which is how to measure what matters and what doesn’t in the steroid era. La Russa and Cohn make no sense at all because they’re arguing it from a moral standpoint. The question to me is, what does a guy on steroids have to do to get in the Hall? Ken Rosenthal asked this on Bob Costas’ HBO show. Is it 600 and more career HRs? Multiple/consecutive 25 win seasons for pitchers? And even if you modify the standards, what do you do with the suspected user who denies it and you can’t prove it? You can’t remove them from the game, the stats, the play-offs or a single Yankee world championship or pennant of the era.
Rob: Cohn’s argument is based on too many hypothetical “ifs” for him to smear every other player he does. If speed was more than a short term ped; if aaron, mays, henderson et al used it, if it pushed them to abnormal levels … considering rice and dawson’s struggles with the hall, you gotta wonder if speed was that big a deal. Where are the numbers surges that upset the stats as much as now? Cohn needs a giant hypothetical to avoid really thinking about the steroid era and his votes.