The 2022 Baseball Hall of Fame Voting:  A Reaction and Analysis

House was Ryan's pitching coach despite being slightly younger and way less accomplished.  So what did House have to teach Ryan?  Maybe the biggest lesson he taught Ryan was how pharmaceuticals could extend his career.  After all, Ryan did give credit to House in his HOF acceptance speech while ignoring many of his other pitching coaches over the years.  But is this really evidence of Ryan being a PED user?  Unless we get a confession in the next few years, Ryan will forever be considered clean.  

So what does Ryan have to do with Ortiz, Bonds and Clemens?  It's mainly the fact that we are convicting some people for a crime while others are getting off scot-free.  It is similar to the way that a person in Idaho can get serious prison time for growing and selling marijuana while I have a friend in California who is worth $10,000,000+ doing that very thing without fear of any kind of legal consequences.   The use of steroids was highly disputed in its prevalence, with Jose Canseco estimating that 85% of major leaguers were also using steroids, Ken Caminiti estimating that 50% of players were using steroids (he later retracted that claim and said that the number was lower) and MLB's survey testing indicated a usage rate of 5-7%, but all of those numbers are unlikely to be reliable.  We can assume that there were plenty of players using steroids who never once got named as a user similar to how there have been closeted players throughout history that we will never know about.  As late as 2014, when testing was in place and the scandal had been fully realized, 143 MLB players were polled and estimated that 9.4% of all players were using some kind of PED.  And this probably ignores the fact that 85-100+ players in the league have prescriptions for ADHD drugs such as Adderall which is an extremely potent performance enhancer.  

Going back to 2013, there have been 23 players elected to the HOF.  Of those 23, at least half have some questionable credentials or circumstances that indicate some PED use.  In 2014, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas were easily elected with few, if any, questions about potential PED use.  Each of the players had generally normal career curves and did not show any significant changes in physique during their careers.  Thomas had a late-career resurgence however, and with a team where steroid use was suspected and where one teammate later was convicted of being a drug trafficker.  But Thomas seems to be clean.   2015 saw Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio get elected.  Of these four, Biggio was the one who stood out as a pretty obvious steroid user and his election after three years despite being a 1st ballot player statistically showed that many voters agreed that he was a likely PED user.  Biggio saw a sudden growth in his power and became much larger physically.   His stats exploded, with a nearly 50% increase in his XBHs from his first four years to his second four years.   He also admitted to using 

Biggio's teammate Jeff Bagwell was another one.  Jose Canseco was especially upset about the induction of Bagwell.  Bagwell admitted to using androstenedione, an anabolic steroid, and showed the obvious signs of steroid use in his career progression from skinny slap hitter to beefy power hitter.  Canseco tweeted this on the day Bagwell was inducted:  "How the f*** is Jeff Bagwell being inducted into the Hall of Fame and Mark McGwire's not that is disgusting...It's a great day for the hypocrisy of the Hall of Fame voting induct all that used PEDs or induct none."  While Canseco is not exactly a reliable source of information, he also said that he personally injected Ivan Rodriguez with steroids.  So 2017 is also marred with two players who at least have some serious questions about their use of PEDs.    

2018 was a relatively modest year in terms of the steroid/PED questions, though Jim Thome did have steroid-like power numbers, his massive size and relatively consistent production put him in the Frank Thomas category of "they really didn't need any more strength, so they would be unlikely to use steroids" but still under some light suspicion due to proximity to other users.  In 2019 there were four men elected, Mariano Rivera, Mike Mussina, Roy Halladay and Edgar Martinez.  Roy Halladay was a vocal critic of PED users being elected to the Hall of Fame (but we've heard plenty of vocal critics of many things later turn out to be guilty of the very thing they were critical of) and Halladay died with a combination of Morphine and amphetamines in his system, so he too may have been using amphetamines (again, a major PED) during his career.   Mussina and Rivera both have been absent from any PED conversation at any point and there's little reason to suspect either, Rivera because he literally just threw one pitch and was scrawny his whole career and Mussina because his career followed the traditional trajectory. 

That leaves Edgar Martinez, who to me is one of the most obvious cases of steroid use in baseball history.   From age 24-30 Martinez was a good hitter, hitting .306 and getting on base at a .391 clip.  He was not, however, a power hitter.  He hit just 186 XBHs in 1940 ABs, a ratio of one XBH every 10.43 ABs.  Over his next 1878 ABs, Martinez had 262 XBHs, a ratio of one XBH every 7.18 ABs, a MASSIVE jump in power that has few precedents for guys OVER THE AGE OF 30.  After age 30, Martinez became an unstoppable power hitter with over 600 XBHs when he was merely a really solid hitter with middling power prior to that.   We also have to keep in mind that there's a lot of guilt by association from being a part of those Mariners teams in the mid-late 90s.  Shane Monahan says he used anabolic steroids when he played for the Mariners. He says Deca-Durabolin and Winstrol were his primary enhancers. He says he got them from "guys" who regularly hung around the clubhouse. And he says he regularly used amphetamines, better known around baseball as energy-boosting "greenies."  He said that he felt a need to use after a conversation during his rookie year with Lou Piniella, during which Monahan says the then-Mariners manager stressed the need to pick up his game. By that point, Monahan had tried everything but steroids.  "It was like, 'You don't hit for enough power. We want you to hit for power. And for you to be able to stay on this team, you're going to have to hit for power,'" Monahan recalls Piniella saying. "I hit 12 to 13 home runs every year in the minor leagues, and now all of sudden my major league manager is telling me we want more power out of you.   "Don't get me wrong: The onus is not on Lou Piniella. I made the decision. Lou didn't come out and say, 'Hey, go get yourself bigger.' I was the one that took the message and said, 'Well, I got to get bigger if I'm going to make this team.'"   During his brief time in Seattle, Monahan came to believe steroid use was widespread in the Mariners' clubhouse, although he refuses to identify those he suspects were using. The Mitchell report identified a handful of players whose tenures overlapped with his in Seattle, including Ryan Franklin, Glenallen Hill, David Segui and Todd Williams.

In 2020, Derek Jeter and Larry Walker were enshrined.  Jeter was as obvious of a 1st ballot guy as anyone in league history, but Walker had toiled around for 10 years before being enshrined.  WHY?  First off, Walker's numbers were impressive but not at the Hall of Fame level.  He was injured a lot of his career and rarely played even 90% of his team's games in a season.  He also played in Colorado where the field and atmosphere act as performance enhancers.  But was Walker suspected of PED use?  Not too much, and his career really shows a pretty natural progression of a wildly talented hitter who spent the majority of his prime in a ballpark that really helps guys like him get big numbers.  His PED was not a drug, but rather a field.  His home stats in his career were so vastly superior to his road stats (which were decent but nothing special) that it seems pretty obvious that he would not have Hall of Fame credentials had he spent his career somewhere other than Denver.  

So in the end, there are easily a dozen players in Cooperstown who used steroids or some other similar PED from the Steroid Era.  So why do they get a pass while Bonds, Ramirez, Sosa, Kent, Clemens and Sheffield are forever punished?  Why do guys like Willie Mays get a pass for amphetamine use when guys like Miguel Tejada serve 50 game suspensions for the same thing?  "One of the greatest players of all time, Willie Mays, had a liquid form of an amphetamine in his locker during his days with New York's most beloved team, the New York Mets.  Teammate John Milner said that amphetamines were so pervasive during his era that when he went into the clubhouse, there were "greenies" waiting for him in his locker. "

In the end, the Hall of Fame should be about impact and greatness, despite flaws.  Because if we are to morally judge Bonds for his steroids, why not judge Cap Anson for banning all black players or Gaylord Perry for throwing spitballs or Nolan Ryan and Willie Mays for their PED use?  Moral judgement cannot be passed by an organization that enshrines racists and even murderers ("In 1912 - and you can write this down - I killed a man in Detroit," Ty Cobb told his biographer), so can we just enshrine the men who had the biggest influence on the game in their eras?   The Baseball Hall of Fame does not hide the fact that baseball was segregated, but it does seem to like to pretend that the past was squeaky clean.  It wasn't.