Bill James is my favorite baseball writer, primarily because when he writes about baseball, he'll often make a useful if tangential point that has nothing to do with the game per se. In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, he wrote the following:
What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards.
I think there's a lot of truth to that observation and I find it helpful to understanding what is going on as we attempt to make sense of the steroid era. James completed this book during the 2000 season, which was in the midst of this era. You can go through all 998 pages of information and you won't find much of any mention of steroids as an issue. Since much of what Bill James has tried to do in his career is to put players and eras into an historical context, he spends a fair amount of time talking about why offenses, particularly home runs, were such a big deal in the 1990s. James mentions that players have become more diligent about training year-round (which steroid use aided) and also pointed to the spate of bandbox ballparks built in the 1990s as the primary reason for the upsurge in home runs. Until Jose Canseco's Juiced came out in 2005, you didn't necessarily hear a lot about steroid use, although there were widespread suspicions about players using steroids.
As the scope of the overall scandal has become more clear, the outrage over steroid use has increased as well. Mark McGwire, who stands among the all-time leaders in home runs, has admitted he used steroids and there's an excellent chance that this admission will keep him from the Hall of Fame. It's quite possible that Barry Bonds will be denied admission to Cooperstown as well. They cheated and we can't condone cheating, or so we are told.
Fortunately, those already enshrined aren't of the same ilk as McGwire, or Bonds, or Rafael Palmeiro, right? Let's again turn to James as he discusses Babe Ruth:
In 1983 a traveling Hillerich and Bradsby exhibit featured a Babe Ruth bat. According to Dan Gutman in It Ain't Cheatin' If You Don't Get Caught, the Seattle players were admiring the bat "when outfielder Dave Henderson noticed that the round end of the bat didn't exactly match the wood of the barrel. The end was cracked, but the rest of the bat was not.
"'That's a plug!' said Henderson. 'This bat is corked.'"
As I pointed out in the Ken Williams comment, Ruth was caught using a trick bat in a game in August, 1923. As I see it, nothing could be more typical of Ruth than to use a corked bat if he could get by with it. Ruth tested the limits of the rules constantly; this was what made him who he was. He refused to be ordinary; he refused to accept that the rules applied to him, until it was clear that they did. Constantly testing the limits of the rules, as I see him, was Babe Ruth's defining characteristic.
Dave Henderson discovered Babe Ruth's crime some 35 years after Ruth died. In the case of McGwire, his crime was discovered much sooner. Now here's a question that we should ask -- if Babe Ruth had been born in 1964 instead of 1894, he would have been a contemporary of McGwire (born 1963), Bonds (born 1964) and Palmeiro (born 1964). Do you suppose that Ruth would have eschewed steroids if he knew that the others were using them?
We can't know the answer to that question. But we can say this much: the baseball writers who control access to the Hall of Fame today are using a much higher ethical standard than has been used before. Should they? I'll talk about that next.
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