Verducci Against Steroids

Tom Verducci explains why he doesn’t vote for known or suspected steroid users for the Hall of Fame:

Clean players

I’m not just talking about the ones on the ballot. I’m talking about the hundreds of clean players who had their livelihoods compromised by steroid users. These are the voices I hear every time I fill out a Hall of Fame ballot. I know how bastardized the game was back then. The inspiration for the 2002 story I wrote on steroids in baseball, which began the public pressure that eventually led to the union dropping its iron-clad resistance to drug testing, were the many clean players who volunteered to me over the 2000 and ’01 seasons how the game was horribly twisted. They told me their dilemma: Either you put yourself at a disadvantage by playing the game clean, or you were forced to risk your health, conscience and legal standing to keep up with the cheats. One clean player I know competed three times with three different teams for a starting job. All three times he lost the job to a steroid user. He never made big money.

In my 2002 story, people mocked former NL MVP Ken Caminiti for suggesting that as many as half the players were on PEDs, claiming he exaggerated the problem. Many of the same people today, in order to simplify their voting, blithely say, “Ah, everybody was doing it.”

Well worth the read.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2j5L30P