Right or wrong? Drugs, baseball and hall of fame

It seems every time I log onto Sports Illustrated at the moment, there is always a new Hall of Fame discussion being held. When baseball finds itself in the midst of a whirlwind, you can count on the ever-reliable Jay Jaffe to be writing numerous articles on the many issues within that bracket.

Striking the most fashion at the moment is the HOF debate, and more importantly the cases of two very prominent figures within baseball: Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds.

Now I didn’t make these nicknames up, but maybe you did? Sammy ‘so-so’, ‘Barroid’, there are countless more thanks to the accusations and subsequent verdicts on these two players and their use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), but the big question is, should they be inducted into the Hall?

Everyone loves a good HOF debate and it really heats up when you consider the magnitude and hype that these individuals bring. Don’t forget Roger Clemens will be in the mix soon unless he decides to return to the majors, which still seems highly unlikely despite the Astros undying love for the 50-year-old and his mini-comeback with the Sugar Land Skeeters this summer.

Bonds – we’ll refer to him by his real name for this – hit 762 home runs in a career beset by controversy, but from 1986 to 1998 he was undoubtedly a Hall of Fame player. During that time with the Pirates and Giants he hit .290 with 411 home runs, a .411 on-base percentage and .556 slugging percentage. We shouldn’t forget that Bonds also won eight gold gloves as a leftfielder, and a sublime one at that, and these particular 12 years were largely before baseball turned into a long-ball junky.

After this time though, bodily changes and rocket-fuelled (please, if you have anything stronger feel free to replace my measly ‘rocket’ with your chosen description) stats led us to a completely different problem. Bonds was no longer a jerk who played astonishing baseball, he was a jerk and a cheat.

If you still hold complete loyalty to Bonds, read Jeff Pearlman’s book ‘Barry Bonds – The Making of an Antihero’. If you still love him after that, good for you.

Bonds’ whole body expanded in every way possible, but the one thing associated with steroid use that we all saw, visibly, was the expansion of his head. Fellow ballplayers must have strolled past thinking: ‘My oh my, what a cranium that man has’. But this was no man, this was a beast. A beast that pushed the boundaries in his workouts through sheer determination and drive, but with acne on his back and an ever-expanding skull, steroids were obviously part of the Bonds regime.

From 1999 to 2007 – and let’s remember that production is supposed to decline as you get older, not improve – Bonds’ numbers went from Hall of Fame to Hall of Stupidity. The man had an OPS of 1.217, which if you look at it is 20% higher than your standard MVP season.

In the space of nine years, Bonds hit 351 home runs, including a 2001 season where he mashed 73 dingers while driving in 137 RBIs. Not bad, huh?

There is a completely different debate asking the question of whether it should be the sports journalists who vote players in or out of the Hall, but that could go on forever and ultimately the media has access to players, management and a whole lot of sources so they have valid knowledge and information in order to make an honest vote.

For Bonds, the voters have two options. Do they take into account Bonds’ numbers and production before his 1999 year and accept that he was a Hall of Famer before he juiced (and don’t forget that a lot of guys juiced at this time), or do they keep him out of Cooperstown because he brought shame to the game and lied for years about his PED use and because of it broke a record which for many should be topped by the honest pairing of Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth?

There is no easy answer, and the probability is that most people could choose both. But both won’t do in a vote of yes or no, so deliberation will take longer than it takes to read this article. Going back to the Rocket, his career and Hall of Fame credentials are very similar to those of Bonds. Clemens was an all-time great and then he started using PEDs later on in his career which gave him unrealistic numbers for an aging fellow.

Like Bonds, Clemens denied juicing but no one really believes him. But these two are carbon copies, so expect the verdict of one to be the verdict of the other. Whether they are remembered and enshrined as all-time greats is the one million dollar question, but I’ll move onto Sosa with this exceptional defence from Bonds that outdoes anything he produced in leftfield. The lefthander claimed that his head was getting bigger because of flaxseed oil. He said as much under oath. Now steroids are supposed to shrink your testicles to minute size, but for Bonds to say that in a court of law takes real balls.

SAMMY SOSA, the other partner in crime. They’re everywhere, aren’t they? Trouble-makers, history-makers, debate-makers, and these two have certainly won that battle. Unlike Bonds, Sosa’s big chunk of years produced very little. From 1989 to 1997 he didn’t really get on base and he didn’t exactly hit the ball like Bonds did. The point is that when Sosa did hit it, it went far enough for fans to catch a souvenir. Perhaps now you understand the nickname ‘so-so’.

Roll up roll up, 1998. The power kicked in, the excitement kicked in and baseball was about to go stir crazy. Sosa hit 66 home runs, yes 66, in one year. Where did that come from? You may well ask, and my guess is a couple of syringes and a bloody good trainer. The following year he hit 63 – Sammy’s at it again! Over a five-year stretch, Sosa averaged 58 home runs and 141 RBIs.

In football, when one player suddenly scores 20 goals in a season having barely scored a handful for the majority of his career, no one points the finger but instead hails a fantastic breakout year which probably won’t ever be repeated. So how did Sosa do it?

In 2003, Major League Baseball started testing its players. That seems very late but as we know the Players Association and the club owners have ultimate control and they want to protect the game and its representatives at all costs. It was only a trial, and MLB promised that the results would remain “anonymous”. Six years on and the New York Times reported that Sosa had failed his “anonymous” test. Because the results were indeed “anonymous” – well they clearly weren’t – Sosa hasn’t confirmed this and MLB can’t either, but in 2004 when drug testing became “real”, Sosa’s numbers suddenly dropped dramatically.

It has never been proved whether Sosa was juicing during his best years and the results of this test prove pretty pointless because they were “anonymous”. Like I said before, in this homerun bashing and run-infested era, steroids were the focal point, and Sosa was one of the best in that steroid era, so why shouldn’t he be inducted?

Ok, he was a fraud. So why should he be inducted? I don’t have the answer, and even if the sports journalists think they do there will never be complete agreement on this subject. There is just so much argument and counter-argument, and so little and so much evidence that we will all have to make do with our own beliefs and, hopefully, stick by them.

We don’t know how else PEDs improve performance other than size, recovery from injury and injury prevention. Bonds and Sosa were incredibly gifted baseball players, and it shows as much when you see how they dominated from high school up to the majors. Some people in the game reckon 50% of ballplayers are still using steroids which is both sad but perhaps true. Over time voters may just throw in the towel with regards to the PED argument and vote solely on on-field performance.

We have evidence that Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire and Gary Sheffield all used PEDs, but the quality and quantity of their usage varies massively.

There is no answer, but I enjoy the debate even so. We’ll find out soon enough whether Bonds and Sosa make it, but even then the answer you’re looking for may not come out. Anyway, I’m off to the local store, which fortunately doesn’t sell flaxseed oil. After all, the consequences are ghastly.