No harm

Mr. Chafets writes that performance enhancing drugs should be legalized, on the grounds that as currently used, they haven’t been proved to do any harm, nor any demonstrable good, either, and that there will never be a foolproof way to test for them. - NY Times

Um, actually? I can prove that performance enhancing drugs can prove harm in two words: Ken Caminiti. Here's an MVP that died as a result of performance enhancing drugs, less than five years ago. Did his death just disappear into a memory hole here, or have we just kind of lost track of that?

Look, I understand how steroids have really complicated everything in baseball, have tossed the record books into a cocked hat, and have become an ethical mine field. Why there's a prohibition against enhancing your body via chemicals (steroids), but not surgical (LASIK), is a miss on a lot of levels.

But there's a world of difference between trying to get an approximation of the steroid problem in baseball and just letting it all fly, and making everyone rub their noses in it by allowing any reprobate, cheater, thief and liar into the Hall. Maybe I'm not the best person to ask about this, given how was never much of a Pete Rose fan (the 1980 championship notwithstanding, he felt like someone else's player, and that year was more about the allmighty power of Michael Jack Schmidt than anything else), but the Hall doesn't seem to be any less of a good time to visit without him in it. Honoring Joe Jackson is more about honoring the quality of the historical rewrite on Joe Jackson; if he had somehow been inducted a decade or two ago, I guarantee you that no one would care about it now.

And for every Sosa, McGwire and Palmeiro you can name who might not ever be enshrined, I could, well, care. Sosa was also overrated, McGwire's numbers aren't that fantastic given the context, and the only difference between Raffy Palmeiro and a lot of other guys who have been kept out is longevity, which really isn't that big of a deal in an era where the players made so much money that leaving early was indefensible on every level.

My bigger problem with the Hall is that they are all equal; when you look at the plaques on the wall, the power-hitting outfielder of the '30s (an extreme offensive era) is the same as the power-hitting outfielder of the '60s, when runs were about as plentiful as logical Hall of Fame votes. The pollution of the Veterans' Committee is also a major compromise in integrity. But at the end of the day, the baseball Hall of Fame is still the only one that anyone really cares about (quick, anyone, name me the biggest omission from the MLB or NFL versions -- yes, you're right, there isn't one), so they must be doing something right.

You want to blow it up, fine, great, good; any institution that could not give Buck O'Neill his due while alive deserves nothing less than scorn. You want to modify it, um, OK, go crazy. You want to ignore it as it slowly sinks into the same irrelevance that the Steroid Era has inflicted on the all-time record book, I'm more or less OK with that, too.

Because the Hall of Fame really isn't about enjoying baseball. It's about enjoying your idea of what baseball is, what it should reward, and who it should honor.

And personally, I'd rather just, well, watch the game.