What about all the players in the 50's and 60's admitting that they took speed on a daily basis. Isn't speed a performance enhancer?

I don't know where the line is drawn only that a line needs to be established so the Hall doesn't have 50 writers imposing their 50 different opinions on the voting process.

I don't care where the line is, only that one needs to be established.

I basically think the roids thing shouldn't matter seeing as it's pretty much a common belief that all the players that are going to be considered for the HOF were doing them......

Also they weren't against baseballs rules, that's baseballs fault, it doesn't give a writer a job to go "oh well I think this is wrong" and then start policing things.

I think its a shame that the selection of outstanding players like Ripken and Gwynn will be overshadowed by the steroids controversy.

And throwing a baseball at someone's head is battery in all 50 states but legal in MLB....


Look, I'm not a McGwire guy at all, but to say that he was using stuff that others didn't is completely asinine.

And FWIW, McGwire also drew a lot of walks, so the guy who used that as an argument is completely full of shit, stupid and/or uninformed.

I would have voted him in. I think it's bullshit that he didn't get in. The stuff he admitted to using was legal at the time. McGwire and Sosa simply saved baseball from the strike.

I have no great love for McGwire, but I think he'll get into the Hall eventually. Even though they were roided to the gills, Mac and Sosa did a great deal for the game by restoring interest lost after the strike.

Unfortunately, Mac never really did much for the Cardinals. Sure he hit his dingers, but he damn sure wasn't clutch, and the Cards didn't do jack shit while he was in St. Louis. In fact, at the end, he was the biggest liability on the team and an absolute guaranteed out.

But even at his best, he couldn't hold Pujols' jock.

This writer says you must confess your sins before admission into the hall:
http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/6351322

This writer submitted a blank ballot because he doesn't know who took steriods and who didn't.
http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/6351216

Caple off of ESPN:
Mark McGwire Be honest. You figured he was on the juice back in 1998 when you were genuflecting at his feet. So why act so hot and bothered about it now just because everyone else is so bent out of shape? ETA: He'll get in the same year sportswriters decide to stop being pompous, self-righteous and sanctimonious.

Stark on ESPN:
There are a million reasons not to vote for McGwire. But of all the reasons people have dredged up lately, the one I find most amazing is the revisionist history that he wasn't that good -- except for those four years (1996-99) when he morphed into Babe Ruth.

Well, hold on. Ask any scout who saw him at USC, and they'll all tell you the same thing: This guy was a big-time masher from the day he was drafted until the day he quit. If it took Jose Canseco's magic potion to make him any good, how come he had a .618 slugging percentage in his rookie season? Andruw Jones, Adam Dunn and Jeff Kent have never slugged .618 in any season, if that tells you anything. And if McGwire wasn't any good until 1996, how did he manage to put up six seasons with at least 32 homers and 90 RBI in his seven healthy seasons before that? That's as many seasons of 32-90 as Chipper Jones and Moises Alou have, combined. If he wasn't any good, how did this man make 12 All-Star teams -- as many as Mike Schmidt? If he wasn't any good, why did he collect MVP votes in every healthy season of his career except one?

The other shaky argument here is that McGwire just had one song on his jukebox, that all he could do was hit home runs, kind of like Dave Kingman. But if he was so one-dimensional, how did he win a Gold Glove? How did he compile that .394 career on-base percentage? And even if he had just one superior dimension, he had the best home run ratio of any player who ever lived (one every 10.6 at-bats). So if people want to vote against him to make a steroid statement, I understand that. But arguing that he didn't have a Hall of Fame career? That one doesn't compute.

So, so true. Any cards fan will admit that they wanted him nowhere near the plate during the 2001 LDS against the Diamondbacks. He was horrendous.

I doubt it. These writers have long memories.

Yep, I don't think any Cardinal fans on here hold him in much high esteem. He hit homers but he just didn't help the team that much. And yes...........

even at his best, Mac couldn't hold Pujols' jock.

The only two deserving guys on that ballot got in.

From an article on Sportsline:

Don't tell me that anabolic steroids weren't against baseball's rules in '98, so the players all have Get Out Of Jail Free cards from that period. Anabolic steroids were -- and are -- against the federal law. It's not clearly spelled out in baseball's rulebook that the cleanup hitter can't strangle the batboy to death in the dugout, either.

Do you think that needs to be covered in the rules?

McGwire and his fellow Bash (The Integrity of the Game) Brothers have dishonored the sport by dragging it into the worst scandal since the 1919 Black Sox.

They have twisted some of the game's most treasured numbers into an indecipherable maze of voodoo statistics largely devoid of meaning and context.

They have turned on the game's most important natural resource -- Little Leaguers, high schoolers and college players -- to a whole medicine's chest worth of dangerous unnatural resources that can be harmful or, at worse, fatal.

The Hall of Fame asks its voters to judge "based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."

But we're here, and just because the players and owners abdicated their responsibility to act in the game's best interest 10 or 15 years ago -- by failing to install anti-steroid measures then, rather than waiting until a couple of years ago -- doesn't mean everybody else should lay down, too.

Bottom line is: It is never too late to do the right thing.

And the right thing here is obvious.

The Hall of Fame never has been a place reserved only for altar boys and Rhodes Scholars.

But neither should it be a safe house for lawless players who spit at baseball history, brush aside the notion of integrity and employ situation ethics to cheat their way up the ladder past Roger Maris, Babe Ruth and, soon enough, Henry Aaron.

And those who bring Hall of Famer and noted spitballer Gaylord Perry into the equation right about now? That's a completely disingenuous comparison, misdemeanor vs. felony. Last time we checked, Vaseline wasn't an illegal substance. Doctoring the baseball, stealing signs ... things that occur on the field, opponents and umpires at least have a fighting chance to catch the perpetrators.

Not so with those who disappear inside of a bathroom stall, or into a dark alley, with the Jose Cansecos of the world, a needle and a bottle of get-rich-quick.

Don't confuse gamesmanship and bending baseball's rules with blatant white-collar crime.

Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were the toasts of the town once, too. Enron was a model company and everyone was making gobs of money.

Then the closet door opened and the skeletons tumbled out.

Do you think Lay and Skilling should have walked when their crimes were revealed simply because those crimes had occurred several years earlier?

The slippery slope here is that we don't have an accurate roll call of who's used and who hasn't over the past decade. What if we withhold votes from some potential Hall of Fame players because we believe they were chemical wizards and yet unknowingly vote other dirty players into Cooperstown?

Inconsistent, yes. But also a risk I'm prepared to take, for a couple of reasons.

First, I'm not willing to throw up my hands and award a free pass to those who either have admitted steroid use or who have been fingered by strong circumstantial evidence simply because ignorance elsewhere might allow others who are guilty to skate into the Hall. That's stupid.

Should we close down the entire court system and refuse to convict anybody simply because we know that while some are being convicted, so many others are out there breaking the law and haven't been caught?

Second, if justice is more equal for some than for others, tough. The players brought this on themselves by refusing to push their union toward doing the right thing years ago. There was a silent majority who had every chance to voice their opinion, tell union leader Don Fehr that they were tired of losing jobs to the cheats and sick of suffering guilt by association.

They didn't.

So if McGwire and certain others connected with steroids fail the Cooperstown entrance exam while somebody else with 'roid-inflated stats sneaks in because nobody knew, well, it will be a shame. It's certainly not my first choice. But some justice is better than none at all.

That we're having this debate at all is based solely on McGwire's 583 home runs -- 33 percent of which are skewed between the suspicious seasons of 1997 and 1999, when he smoked 193 of those dingers.

Remove those, and he's nowhere close to Cooperstown. Of the 18 first basemen currently in the Hall of Fame, only Harmon Killebrew has a lower career batting average than McGwire's .263, only Frank Chance has fewer hits than McGwire's 1,626 and only Chance, Hank Greenberg and George Kelly have fewer at-bats than McGwire's 6,187.

And we're supposed to grin and look the other way at those beefed-up power numbers?

Sorry. The ballot I mailed back the other day did not contain a check next to the McGwire box, and I don't plan on checking it anytime soon, either.

If his own career was constructed with materials suspicious enough that McGwire continues to refuse to defend it, I don't see why anybody else would venture anywhere near that weak and shaky limb to defend him, either.

How easy it is to get on your soapbox and proseltyze after the party in question has already been publicly vilified.

Pujols is a complete player. 6, 8, 10 more years of this and he's first ballot. McGwire shouldn't make it even without the roid controversy.

McGwire/Sosa/Bonds symbolize the darkest era of any in the modern history of American sports. They should go down as pariahs for the credibility of the game.

I don't think we should let Bonds in on the basis that he "would have" gotten there anyway without the roids. If you let people in based on what they "would have" done, then there's no requirement for longevity anymore. A guy whose great career lasted 5 years and then was derailed by injury or something else could say, "well I would have had a great career if not for XYZ."

Lumping McGwire in with Cansucko is wrong. Whoever wrote that article is a fucking idiot.

Cansucko willfully did his roids along with everybody else. Then when his career ended, he sold all his friends and colleagues down the river for the sole and exclusive purpose of increasing his books sales and making more money. He is a dishonorable, amoral, despicable, back-stabbing piece of shit. Cheating sucks, but betraying ones friends is far worse in my book.

At least McGwire keeps his mouth shut and hides from the media.