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Have Steroids Tarnished Baseball’s Hall of Fame Debate?

It’s always a source of debate when Hall of Fame voting season turns up. Who deserves to get enshrined at Cooperstown? And what are the exact qualifications that voters examine? According to the latest speculation, Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven are the frontrunners to make it in when the announcement comes this afternoon.

Still, some writers are making the cases for their hometown heroes (Barry Larkin, Edgar Martinez) who appear on ballots this year. Voting has been complicated – and will remain that way for several years to come – by the so-called steroids era that has tainted recent baseball history. Mark McGwire, for instance, hasn’t made it in yet, and others may face the same fate. What does that mean for the Baseball Writers Association of America and the game in general?

The real problem hasn’t even hit yet: “Voting for the Hall of Fame, always a difficult task that requires separating the truly great from the very good, has become even more tricky because of how steroid users corrupted the game,” says Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci. But it isn’t even so bad yet. “In 2013, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa will debut on the ballot.” Let’s see how we handle that. “A Hall of Fame vote is the highest endorsement of a career,” after all. Luckily, between now and then, “there are plenty of players” who honored the game “who will be voted in.”

Actually, it’s already here: While some say “there’s a Cooperstown crisis coming,” says Jayson Stark at ESPN, I believe it “already has arrived. It arrived the moment my 2011 Hall of Fame ballot showed up in the mailbox.” Since we haven’t yet taken an official stand on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs, and we haven’t been instructed about how to treat these players, “the PED nightmare is only making a mess of my ballot.” Consider this a “plea for the Hall of Fame to deal with this crisis, to figure out whether there’s a place for the stars of this era in the Hall and to stop asking voters like me to sign up for the morality police force and sort it all out for them.” This was a “powerful reminder…of how impossible that job really is.”

Steroids aren’t the only thing to blame: “Voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame will always be one of the elite privileges I’ve had,” says Marc Topkin in the St. Petersburg Times. “It’s just too bad it’s getting so complicated and controversial — and a lot less enjoyable.” Now we have to make “increasingly uncomfortable decisions” beyond “whether a player was truly dominant in his era.” It goes well beyond steroids, though; other factors include newfangled stats (that “can be too much”), a changing game, the prominence of the DH, and questions over character. How are we supposed to choose? “I told you this wasn’t fun” anymore.

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