The Hull Shebang: Steroid use shouldn’t disqualify baseball players from Hall of Fame

When I was nine years old, my dad took me to a San Francisco Giants game. To see the team by the Bay in person, albeit from all the way in the upper deck, was something to be excited about for weeks.

But like any elementary schooler hyped up on soda and hot dogs, there was no way I could simply sit and watch. I wandered around AT&T Park until I reached the speed gun underneath the center field bleachers.

After wasting some money, I ventured towards the outfield wall. Back then, there was no elaborate beer garden with a net over it to protect the unsuspecting fans from the occasional dinger – just a Doggie Diner with TVs, televising the bottom half of the inning.

Barry Bonds came up to bat, and my eyes were glued to the screen. The broadcast had an oh-so-slight delay, so the stadium went into a frenzy before I could see Bonds make contact and the center fielder give futile chase.

The ball landed midway up the center field bleachers and bounced down into the open space.

I was frozen in awe of what was happening and couldn’t do anything but watch as the ball bounced right in front of me and into the hands of a man paying for his meal. Such was the story of Barry Bonds’ 715th home run, which broke Babe Ruth’s total of 714.

The ball ended up selling for $220,100 on eBay.

A year later, Bonds would break Hank Aaron’s record of 755 and officially become the best home run hitter in all of baseball. Yet, after this year’s vote, he’s still not in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. That needs to change.

The Cooperstown, New York, sanctuary is a place meant to honor the best players that ever played the game, period. It’s no secret that Bonds took steroids – ESPN has a timeline of the years of muddiness – but that should not be grounds for automatic dismissal from consideration, because there’s one thing that separates baseball from other common “steroid sports” like track and field and football.

Steroids don’t give a baseball player an incredible advantage – all they do is give a player an amount of muscle otherwise unattainable.

In track and field and football, sure, mass has a direct correlation to performance, but in baseball? Some of the biggest players are the worst and some of the smallest players are the best.

Take former UCLA infielder Chase Utley. He’s only 6 feet 1 inch and 195 pounds, but he’s a six-time All-Star and has nearly 1000 career RBIs.

A 90-mile-per-hour fastball can reach home plate in four-tenths of a second. The batter can take up to a quarter of a second to identify the pitch and its rotation before he has to decide whether or not to swing. Then there’s the factor of just where his swing needs to go and how it needs to hit the ball.

On the pitcher’s end, to be able to throw a variety of pitches that each have different movements and speeds through windows of the strike zone as small as dimes is also incredibly difficult.

Roger Clemens, one of the best pitchers of all time, also used performance-enhancing drugs. He hasn’t gotten off the Hall of Fame ballot either.

Steroids could have gotten him some extra zip on his fastball, but the fact remains that Clemens won 354 games and seven Cy Young Awards, and steroids were not the driving factor behind that.

There are many who have used steroids with little effect on their standing in the league like Alec Asher, Raul Mondesi and Chris Colabello.

Don’t recognize those names? Of course not – none of them have ever been in the discussion except for when they each received 80 game bans for steroids in 2016.

That being said, there’s no doubt that steroids corrupt the moral nature of the game. I’m not advocating for free usage. But some of the most accomplished players are at serious risk of being left out of the Hall of Fame for something that was not responsible for their successes.

Voters need to take that into account come next January’s voting session, because for the love of the game, not getting Bonds and Clemens into the Hall of Fame would be terrible.