I’m often dismissed as an extremist-nutjob when it comes to PEDs and the Hall of Fame, but Bill Conlin just won the Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award and will be honored at the induction ceremonies in Cooperstown next summer for cryin’ out loud. Maybe someone will listen to him:
I am increasingly uncomfortable determining who is in and who is out of the HOF based on a process in which an increasingly undefinable moral code is the compass in the absence of evidence ... It is past time for the people who make the Hall of Fame eligibility rules to lose the morals clause, or at least the “integrity, sportsmanship, character” wording ... Just let us vote the HOF ballot without the impediment of a moral code guiding a flawed process in which big-league players can’t even be tested for HGH, where all those Barry Bonds-sized heads and jacked-up strength and reflexes come from. Most of us know a great ballplayer when we see one. Let us decide without a morals clause whether the guy cheated to become one.
I think Bill and I would vote very differently for the Hall of Fame. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because in this we would be disagreeing on the merit of candidates as baseball players, not moral actors, and that would improve the process considerably.