I’ve been a baseball fan most of my life. Always the St. Louis Cardinals. If you grew up in West Tennessee before the 1990s, you were in the Cardinals’ media market. I don’t know who radio and TV stations play there now, since I left for college in 1989, but I have my suspicions since my youngest sister and all her friends are Braves fans. [Don't get me started.]
While we’re discussing my family, I’ll throw out my disclaimer. My other sister is the editorial director at MLB.com. [Yes, it is exactly that cool.] We actually don’t discuss baseball very often, and my opinions here don’t reflect hers. [I'm not even sure what, if anything, she thinks about this topic.]
But I read the article this a.m. in the New York Times about St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa’s continuing support of Mark McGwire. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me that everyone kept talking about McGwire’s character and integrity. I have never understood why that’s a criteria for the Hall of Fame.
First off:
What makes sportswriters [who select Hall of Famers] qualified to judge character and integrity? I have a number of good friends who are or have been sportswriters. I would not dare impugn their character or integrity, but I also don’t think sportswriters as a group are any more or less qualified than anyone else to judge character. However, I think many of them are excellent judges of athletic ability.
Second:
What the hell does character have to do with how well you slug that baseball? Not a damn thing.
Here, of course, we get into those who object to McGwire’s entry because he won’t deny using steroids or some kind of performance-enhancing drugs, and to those who object to Pete Rose’s entry because he committed the cardinal sin of betting on baseball.
Here’s what I say:
If McGwire did [and I hold out that distinct possibility, even though I would certainly hope that there's more evidence than what Jose Canseco has to say about it -- really. Would you take Canseco's word on anything?] use performance enhancing drugs, I say the onus is on Major League Baseball for fostering a culture that encouraged their use and for not instituting programs that catch offenders. MLB’s efforts in this area until the past two years have been positively anemic. The message to anyone watching was, don’t ask, don’t tell.
Similarly, I object to people holding Pete Rose to such a high moral standard. Yeah, he screwed up. Deserved to get fired and kicked out of the game for his failings. However. He remains the best ballplayer who’s not in the Hall. We can celebrate his incredible success as a player without lauding his lack of ethics.
The idea that doing something that many, many other ballplayers also did [in McGwire's case] or even doing something unethical related to the game [as Rose did] should override the extraordinary playing careers of these two men just boggles my mind.
Let’s judge character, or let’s judge ballplayers. Let’s not confuse the two.
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