With Mark McGwire finally admitting his guilt and getting his steroid pumped monkey off his back. The sports commentators have again started talking about the steroid era and whether or not players such as McGwire, Clemens and such should be inducted into the hall fame. In my opinion they should be with a note under their names explaining their story and place in history. Now this is something that has been debated within the past 10 years. However, what hasn't been talked about much within my media circle until today, when it was brought up on Around the Horn, is should coaches during this era be accepted into the hall of fame?
Think about it. What if the majority of coaches knew that their players were taking steroids? Which I don't believe is too far fetched. Coaches like Joe Torre, benefited a lot by the hands of Roger Clemens and Andy Petite. Would the Yankees have won the World Series if Clemens and Petite allegedly were on the juice? Maybe Yankees wouldn't have won as many World Series that they did or maybe they would have. This types of questions should be asked and debated since players have fallen under scrutiny, it would be only fair that coaches take it as well. If Clemens and Bonds don't get into the hall of fame, coaches who benefited from players who were juicing and had known about it should face the same fate.
I say Clemons and Bonds deserve to get in and without anything next to their names because if we do that to them, then we need to mark all the players from the 70's for using amphetamines, and we need to mark all of the pre-intergration players for not ever playing against minority players. See the can of worms that gets opened up. Plus lets look at the fact that if we just go off of their stats from when Roger was a Red Sox and Barry was a Pirate, those numbers alone are HOF worthy. Just let them in because whether they juiced or not, there was still a hell of a lot of God given talent that I believe got them to where they were and the roids if there was any only had moderate gains for them at the most. Just one Black man's opinion here.
ReplyDeleteI concur. Clemons and Bonds deserve the hall, without question. Everything you say is right on the money, which is why when reporters and players talk about keeping the game pure and not putting in dirty players I always choke on my food. The hall has been dirty since they put Ty Cobb in so why stop now.
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