PEDs and the Hall

Bill James follows up on a previous essay by explaining his system for sorting Hall of Famers (subscription required). In doing so he asks the question, “How many players are there who were obvious inner-circle Hall of Famers, based on their stats, but who have been denied entry to the Hall of Fame because of PED concerns?”

There are six: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez, Gary Sheffield and Sammy Sosa.

Interestingly, Mark McGwire ranks as a second tier Hall of Famer in this system, which plays into the argument you sometimes hear that McGwire doesn’t deserve to go into the Hall of Fame despite the home runs, because the rest of his game wasn’t that good.

More importantly, Bill lays out clearly the main arguments for and against electing players with the PED taint:

THE steroid argument, when you think about it a little more, is actually at least three different arguments. There is the moral argument—that is, that these players are cheaters, that they dishonored the sport and harmed baseball, and they shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame (despite their accomplishments) because they are unworthy of the honor.

There is also a completely unrelated argument, which has no moral component, which is that some of these players—let’s say Sheffield and Sosa—have what APPEAR to be Hall of Fame numbers, but do not actually have Hall of Fame stature when you remove their numbers from the inflated context of the steroid era. This is a normal “context” adjustment. We adjust hitting stats for the park, for the era; we adjust the won-lost records of pitchers for the performance of the team. We adjust for the inflated hitting numbers of the steroid era. That is very, very different from the moral argument.

There is, finally, the argument that “I will give these players credit for what they did based on their own skills, on their work and dedication, but I will not give them credit for the EXTRA things that they were able to do because of PED use. I am not casting aspersions upon their character; I am not banning them from the Hall of Fame as cheaters. I am merely not going to give them credit for the extra things that the steroids did for them.”

I tend to lean toward the third argument. Bill goes on from there to talk about more nuanced approaches. This is a site that is well worth the subscription fee, and this article is a reason why.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2jY7TIl