Another example of a Holier Than Thou writer having a position without knowing all of the facts. It’s not their responsibility to punish PED users; it’s their job to vote in the best players in the history of the game. If Bonds & Clemens aren’t 1st ballot worthy, then the HOF is a complete sham to me & means nothing. What tarnishes the sanctity of the HOF is writers who allow their personal opinion outside what I player did on the field to determine their eligibility. PEDs were so rampant in MLB that the dumb ones were the ones who didn’t use.

Secondly, again as I understand it, Pete never bet AGAINST his team. Therefore the CHEATING to me, exceeded the gambling offense – Althought both are WRONG.

I was simply stating that if Craig wanted to banter about on some great injustice, there are far greater issues Craig could focus on than lobbying for these cheating dirtballs.

He hit 450 home runs in 15 seasons, and 10 were in the dead air of the Astrodome.
MVP ROY Gold Glove, considered one of the best base runners of his time ( not to be confused with a base stealer) although he had 200.

300 avg, one year hit .367, he had 1500 runs 1500 rbi’s. 1 team. 1 world series.

Always a class act with fans and media. Craig Biggio will say he was the best Astro ever, and Biggio is going in this year.

7 straight years with 30 100 100 100, few have done that, names like Gherig, Mays, and Ruth.

So I am glad I can clear that up for you.

If you like WAR, he went 8.4; 2.3; 5.8; 1.7; and 7.4 from ’92-’96.

I’ll preface it by saying that yes, I do live in Boston. But look at Clemens carefully. The man has 3 halves to his career. First phase is from 1984-1991, where he is a very promising, HOF kind of superstar. 3 CYs, MVP, all that jazz. Then you have the middle part, where he went 40-41 over 4 years, notig spectacular, and Dan Duquette called him “in the twilight of his career”. Then magically he goes to Toronto and turns back into a superstar and defies age and all other things for 10 years.

I don’t know what conclusions to derive from this…..

Player 1 has a strong career, which some may be able to argue is a borderline hall of fame case, while others see it as a solid HOF case. He also has some rumors of drug use surrounding him which have no evidence. Is he a Hall of Famer?

Player 2 has a slam-dunk hall of fame career. About as good as it gets. However, there’s very strong evidence that he used performance enhancing drugs for at least some portion of his career. Is he a Hall of Famer?

My point to the original poster was that these aren’t the same question, and the results of player 1′s vote can’t be used to predict the results of player 2′s vote. That’s all.

And it’s worth noting that the careers of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens don’t rest on a single number being in the all-time top 10, like that of Sammy Sosa (though I guess to be fair, Sosa’s also third on the all-time strikeout list, though few would consider that criteria for enshrinement).

Sammy’s career OPS+ was 128. In the very same era, Barry Bonds had a career OPS+ of 182. This isn’t a couple of guys who were similar players here.

The point is, the voters may be able to poke holes in the hall of fame cases of some players (Bagwell, and perhaps even Sosa), but there aren’t holes in the cases for Bonds and Clemens. The singular question in the case of those men is whether or not writers wish to say that anyone who has likely used any of the drugs they deem to be inappropriate should be kept from the hall of fame. That’s it.

Essentially, while Bagwell was certainly unfairly penalized by some voters for their unfounded steroid guesswork, others said he was a marginal case, for whatever reason. That’s not an issue for these guys, so it’s a different question.

All greenie users. The same PED that has Carlos Ruiz suspended for the first 25 games of 2013.

MLB players have ALWAYS used what’s out there to enhance performance, and just as greenies were condoned by MLB—the clubs made them available them before every game!!—so were steroids.

Just as the Greenie Generation played, won, lost, accrued stats, etc. during the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, so to did the Roid Generation of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s.

If the Greenie Generation is hall-eligible, so too should be the Roid Generation.

These clowns should have no shot with their overwhelming evidence.

Along those same lines, there is more evidence that amphetamines help performance than steroids do, and players took steroids from the late 1940s through the early 2000s. Man, that is a LOT of generations of players that cheated the game.

At the end of the search, I looked upon my list of HOFers…discovered it was basically just a list of players more than 60 WAR (with a few exceptions) and lamented the many, many hours of my life I’d wasted doing so.