Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Manny Ramirez and Sammy Sosa ring a bell for more than just their ability on the field.
All four have been associated with PED use, or to put it another way, for cheating.
Technically, Ramirez is the only one who has been caught and suspended for PED use. It happened to him on more than one occasion in his career.
The other three have merely had PED use allegations tossed at them. Nothing has ever been proven.
Yet, that hasn’t stopped anyone from putting an asterisk next to each one of their stat lines, particularly Bonds, who is the all-time leader in home runs with 762.
And I guess when it comes to Ramirez, you can chalk his actions up to Manny being Manny.
I think as more time passes from the era those guys played in, the less we remember what exactly they did wrong in the first place.
Time heals all wounds. It also makes you forget about the use of performance-enhancing drugs by baseball stars.
On that note, I think the odds have improved that at least one of the four will get in at some point. The voters see the candidates in a different light because so much time has passed since their playing days.
Bonds and Clemens seem to have the best odds. In my opinion.
If I had a vote for the Hall of Fame, I’d probably give it to those two simply because Bonds and Clemens were destined to be great even before they cheated. I’m not so sure PEDs had as much of an impact on their careers as they did for Sosa and Ramirez. Not to mention that Bonds and Clemens put up better numbers over the course of their baseball careers.
If none of the four get in, my feelings won’t be hurt. I’m sure yours won’t be either.
Then again, you can’t fault the players entirely for turning to PED use, or suspected use in the case of Bonds, Clemens and Sosa, even though they clearly know the difference between right and wrong.
And we all know drugs are bad. We all learned that back in grade school.
Still, Major League Baseball deserves to shoulder some of the blame for the steroid era. It looked the other way as home runs flew out of the park in the summer of 1998 and beyond.
The home run party served as a shot in the arm to a sport that was in dire need of one considering it was just a handful of years removed from a strike that canceled the 1994 playoffs and World Series.
Baseball knew the steroid thing was going on. You’d be a fool to think it didn’t.
The players just played along with the game. The fans loved every moment of it.
It’s going to be interesting to see what percentage of the vote Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and Ramirez receive this time around. I doubt it will be enough to get them into the Hall of Fame.
But maybe down the road, one of the four I’ve mentioned gets into the hall. At that point we will know that the steroid era is not only gone but forgotten as well.
