Your Steroid Resource

Unlike some baseball writers who vote for the Hall of Fame, I refuse to take the hard line against steroids when it comes to baseball’s most sacred honor.  Rather, those players who come up for debate must be evaluated on an individual basis and subjected to a set of criteria that should be applied across the board.  You may notice that I pay no attention to whether or not a player has admitted using, or tested positive for steroids, and this is where I think the writers come up short.  Just because a player has not tested positive means only one of two things – either he is clean, or he hasn’t been caught.  With that, here is my criteria, which I’ll put to practice and apply to a few possible Hall of Famers in future posts:
 

• There are no “magic numbers”: 500 homers no longer generates an automatic ticket to Cooperstown
• Consider the whole skill set: This should eliminate the one-dimensional players
• How does he rank amongst his peers?: A combination of the first two points – though the numbers may look good at the end, where did he rank amongst his peers on a season-to-season basis?

Baseball is a game that can be looked at in “eras.”  There was the “dead-ball era,” the “live-ball era,” and the era in which the pitchers’ mound was raised and batting averages were lowered.  There is nothing about this era that warrants any special consideration – players, and statistics, are judged amongst those they played with – and that’s exactly what I’m proposing we get back to doing.  Coming up, I’ll take a look at a few players (past and present) to see how they stack up using my proposed criteria.