Scandal, like taste in music or film, is subjective. Tolerances change based on generations, geography, and any number of other cultural factors. Every year at this time, we are reminded that there is a group of people dead set on defining scandal for sports fans everywhere. That group is the baseball writers casting their ballots each year for who gets into the sport’s Hall of Fame.
The 2023 class is solidified after Tuesday’s announcement. MLB Network devoted nine hours of live television to read one name – Scott Rolen, a perfectly fine and unobjectionable, although uninteresting choice. He is the only modern player that will join Fred McGriff for induction this summer in Cooperstown.
It’s not that there weren’t other, more qualified candidates on the ballot. It is that the majority of voters are operating under the delusion that they are protecting baseball by punishing cheaters.
Every year when the voting results are revealed the same debate rages – do some of the most accomplished players of the steroid era warrant inclusion?
How many more times do these voters have to hear that the majority of sports fans have not thought about Barry Bonds’s head size in a decade? What will it take to get them to realize that most of us do not care what Alex Rodriguez or Roger Clemens were putting in their bodies?
We came for the dingers. All we cared about (for the most part) were the dingers. Put in the monsters genetically engineered to hit nothing but dingers!
As a sport, baseball has a problem with time. The people that cover it revere its past and complain openly about the present state of the game. When the people that the general public relies on to follow the game are married to the idea that we will never see anything as good as what happened 75 to 100 years ago again, you’ve created a real problem for your future.
I am not going to argue that steroid users have been punished enough. I am here to tell you that punishing them in the first place is another example of baseball’s misguided priorities. Steroid use, while illegal, was only ever a scandal because baseball insisted it was.
Let’s cut the bullshit. Steroids saved baseball. Pretending to abhor them and the numbers they created is hypocritical and childish.
I was a huge baseball fan in my youth. I lived through all of the steroid era. I remember being on the phone with my high school girlfriend the night that Mark McGwire hit his 62nd home run. As he and Sammy Sosa embraced, I wasn’t thinking about all of the horse hormones coursing through their veins. I was thinking “this is f***ing awesome!”.
Now at 41, I couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about baseball. Why? Because the people that hold the game sacred have bent over backward to tell me that I should be ashamed of the era that made me fall in love with the game.
The day the newest Hall of Fame class is revealed should be a celebration for any sport. For baseball, it always ends up turning into a day where we wonder if the voters, the media that tell the sport’s story to the public, are living in the same reality we are.
They are married to a scandal that time hasn’t forgotten. Time has decided it was incredibly stupid. Barry Bonds was good for baseball. Roger Clemens was good for baseball. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were Godsends for baseball. In 2023, most sports fans acknowledge that is true.
I genuinely feel bad for Fred McGriff and Scott Rolen. Baseball writers (not all of them, but enough of them) have wielded their power and influence in a way that has turned what should be one of the best days of their professional lives into a day when plenty of us Gen Xers and elder millennials are wondering why we are supposed to ashamed of the stars we grew up watching.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
