A reminder: there is almost certainly a current Hall of Famer who used PEDs

And I’m not even talking about greenies or horse liniment or whatever old school product that enhanced performance even if people today want to act like it didn’t. I’m talking about steroids or HGH or PEDs in that general category. We like to pretend that there isn’t anyone who did that before Jose Canseco, but that’s almost certainly false.

Evidence? For one thing there was Thomas Boswell in Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary update “The Tenth Inning,” who said that he personally witnessed a current Hall of Famer take a PED-laden shake:

“There was another player now in the Hall of Fame who literally stood with me and mixed something and I said “What’s that?” and he said “it’s a Jose Canseco milkshake”. And that year that Hall of Famer hit more home runs than ever hit any other year. So it wasn’t just Canseco, and so one of the reasons that I thought that it was an important subject was that it was spreading. It was already spreading by 1988.”

Everyone forgets that and Boswell tends to keep pretty silent about that come Hall of Fame voting time in December.

Then, just last night came this interesting tidbit from Patty Blyleven, first wife of Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven, from Ross Newhan’s Facebook page just last night:

No, I do not consider Patty Blyleven to be an authoritative source on such matters. She may be passing things along third hand for all we know. But it’s naive in the extreme to think that the first ballplayer to ever take PEDs and then try to enter the Hall of Fame was Mark McGwire or someone of his era.