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Sunday, February 8, 2009

Why Alex Rodriguez Still Belongs In The Hall of Fame

So here’s what we know to be fact: four independent sources confirmed to Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts that Alex Rodriguez’s name was on a list of players who tested positive for steroids during the 2003 survey testing in Major League Baseball.  From that point on, we have to make assumptions.

The first assumption, and it’s a fairly safe one, is that Alex Rodriguez’s name is on a list of players who tested positive for steroids during the 2003 survey testing in Major League Baseball.  Wait, what?  Yes, that’s an assumption, because we haven’t seen the list, nor for that matter has Roberts.  But, four independent sources are confirming this, so it’s very unlikely that it’s not true.  Still, it’s an assumption, not a known fact.

The next assumption is that this means that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for two banned substances during the 2003 test.  This is, again, a solid assumption, though there are plausible alternatives.  The least plausible is that someone tampered with the results, either switching the results or tainting the sample.  Equally implausible is that the test was a false positive—it happens, but I find it highly unlikely that he would have two false positives for two separate steroids.  Finally, I consider it to be very plausible, but also highly unlikely, that a clerical error resulted in A-Rod’s name being attached to someone else’s results.

Because players were tested more than once in 2003, and you didn’t want players who tested positive twice to be double-counted in the survey, it was necessary to indicate which sample belonged to which player.  This was done by assigning each player a code, labeling the sample with the code, and then storing the key list in another state.  Now, the key list should have been destroyed as soon as the last sample was tested, but it wasn’t, and when the government seized the results and key in the BALCO investigation, it was an easy matter to put them together.

It’s plausible that in creating the key, or in labeling the sample, an error was made and the wrong code was put in the wrong place.  Again, this is highly unlikely to be the case—but if A-Rod is going to go down the denial route, this would probably be the best explanation to throw out there.

After this assumption, we move on to not unlikely, but unsupported assumptions.  Was A-Rod using before 2003?  Was he using after 2003?  Is he still using?  Has he used his entire career?  These are all, at this point, completely unknowable questions.  Even the “eye-test”, for what it’s worth, doesn’t tell us much.  A-Rod has gotten larger over his career, but it’s been a gradual thing, so there’s no clear delineating point there.

The question I ask here is, should what we know be enough to keep Alex Rodriguez out of the Hall of Fame?  I say no.

If Alex Rodriguez is on that list and tested positive for steroids in 2003, he’s still only one out of 104 players who tested positive that season.  Not only that, but we can also guess that two players—Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens—are not on that list, either.  If their names were on the list, it’s fairly likely that Congress would have subpoenaed that information by now and charged both men with perjury.

The point is that Alex Rodriguez is not alone in what he did, that there are many, many players who did the same thing.  Before Saturday morning, almost nobody considered Rodriguez a likely steroid abuser, and anyone who did was keeping pretty damn quiet about their suspicions.  There are many players on the same list with Rodriguez who we were not aware had abused steroids, there are many players who are *not* on that list, who nonetheless abused steroids, and whose use we remain unaware of, perhaps forever.

If we decree that anyone who uses steroids is ineligible for the Hall of Fame, we are making a grave error.  We would not be punishing players for using steroids to improve their performance, but rather for getting *caught* using steroids.  Had the results of the 2003 survey tests never been revealed—and had the government not seized more than the 10 names they were allowed to in 2004, they never would have been—we would have never known that Rodriguez had used steroids.  So in 15 years or so, we’d be electing a man who used steroids to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, while patting ourselves on the back for keeping those cheaters Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro out forever.  Good on us.

There are those voters who have declared that they will never vote for somebody from the steroid era.  The inherent problem with this is that they already have.  Former pitcher Tom House admitted to using steroids in the early 70s, and says that he was not alone, not by a long shot.  Perhaps it was only the borderline players who were pushing it, but that would seem to go against everything we know about professional athletes.  If there were scrubs doing it, there were probably some stars doing it, too.  There may have been a Hall of Famer who tried steroids, but steroids have been part of the game for far longer than the general public assumes, and the true steroid era has already had Hall of Fame inductees.

And to go even further, we can be sure that the steroid era will never, ever end.  Sure, we can increase the penalties—even a lifetime ban for the first positive test—but there will always be players willing to ingest illegal steroids because it gives them a better shot at making The Show, or making the big bucks.  And the players already making the big bucks will have the resources to get the stuff that we’ll never find, at least not for a while.  We’ll never get PEDs out of the game.  So, if you’re keeping all players of the steroid era out, then we must never elect anyone to the Hall of Fame ever again.  Which is silly.

Of course we can’t just ignore what they did, but what I suggest is that we put what the players who were caught cheating did into context.  Even assuming that A-Rod suffers a severe dropoff this season and gradually declines to mediocrity by the end of his contract, what we’ll still have is a player likely in the top 5 all-time in hits, top-ten in doubles, and close to or holding the records in runs scored, home runs and runs batted in.  He may finish with well over 800 home runs, in fact.

Now, knowing that he has the taint of steroids, we can’t take those numbers at face value.  But what if we go all-out and assume he’s been using since high school, that every number was aided by steroids?  I would have to say that even an extreme estimate of what he’d have done clean all those years would still be a shortstop/third baseman with nearly 400 home runs and over 2500 hits—and an excellent defensive shortstop at that.  That’s a no-brainer Hall of Famer, even deducting credit through the character clause.

By that standard A-Rod gets in, Bonds gets in, Clemens gets in.  Diminishing the value of Rafael Palmeiro’s stats, even in a less brutal fashion, probably leaves him looking like a borderline case, with the character issue keeping him out.  Mark McGwire very probably has the same result.

How much to discount a player’s stats would be in the judgment of the individual voter, but there’s no exit door for the Hall of Fame—when you’re in, you’re in—and it’s better to discount the accomplishments of the ones who were caught than to banish them forever while finding out later on that one you enshrined had been even guiltier, and with a worse resume.

Alex Rodriguez can never again claim to be the greatest player that ever lived (not that I felt he’d have a legitimate claim until he was an All Star pitcher), but he’s a Hall of Famer.  I just don’t see a logically consistent way to keep him out.