Baseball Graphs

McGwire and the Hall

Just one post. I promise.

I’m pretty sick and tired of reading about McGwire and the Hall vote (and I’ll bet Ripken and Gwynn are tired of it, too).  McGwire did break the law (though a relatively minor one; and not against the law in many other countries) and he did something that he knew stood against MLB policy.  I don’t hold these issues against him very much, however, because he did so in an environment that didn’t reinforce its policies at all.  In fact, several MLB teams made amphetamines freely available; that is, they encouraged this sort of illegal behavior.  Shoot, any thinking person should have known that McGwire and Sosa were taking steroids.  Those who were expected to enforce those policies, or report the truth, looked the other way.  Given those circumstances, I would have voted him in.

The McGwire backlash, it seems to me, has been in direct proportion to the extreme hype he received in 1998.  The BBWAA members feel betrayed.  Since they built him up, they feel obligated to bring him down.  I find this aspect of the whole affair sordid and unseemly.

But I was glancing through Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract (the newer one) and came across a comment in the Robin Yount section that seems relevant, concerning his holdout in the spring of 1978.

Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards.  Same thing with Yount; he wasn’t backing away from baseball; he was just putting the bit in his teeth, accepting new responsibilities.  In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.

Perhaps this is worth noting.  Perhaps the McGwire Hall of Fame scandal isn’t really about McGwire.  It’s about a new standard of ethics being applied to baseball, by writers, fans, management and, hopefully, players.  Baseball has a patina of innocence to it, one that doesn’t exist in basketball or football.  Obviously, it’s important to the general public that baseball remain that way.  What we’re observing is the imposition of a new ethical standard, to make sure baseball maintains its innocent glow.

Let’s hope it takes.

I was just reading that same entry on Yount last week. I think there’s a lot of confusion right now among the fans, media, and MLB itself. It’s true that we’re trying to find the new standard of ethics for steroid use within baseball. However, there are a bunch of different ethical questions that are of varying degrees of difficulty to find an answer to:

1. (Easy) What constitutes cheating for an individual player given whatever the current rules are for MLB?
2. What responsibility does a player have to talk about past transgressions?
3. What is the appropriate steroid/substance policy for MLB?
4. Why hasn’t MLB had a more rigorous policy to date? In what ways have the potential for lost revenue kept MLB brass from imposing and enforcing an appropriate policy?
5. What is MLB’s responsibility to protect the health and well-being of its players?
6. What is MLB’s responsibility to protect young fans from learning bad lessons from baseball?

It seems to me that other sports leagues, such as the NFL and NBA, have much stricter and better-enforced policies, and they work. MLB seems to be hesitating for fear of loss of great statistical achievements by the players, particularly because steroid/HGH use is so rampant. If they bite the bullet and put a real policy in place, there would be changes that are too strong too soon. My guess is they are doign things gradually.

So, it’s all very confusing right now. McGwire is bearing the brunt of the incoming wave of this confusion.