Trump calls on Baseball Hall of Fame to admit Roger Clemens

[gunboat82]

Originally Posted by G1911

McNamee's DNA evidence, as I recall, was stored in a can in a box in his house for several years to use as future blackmail, and the single needle that tested positive for steroids didn't have Clemens DNA on it - his DNA was on the cotton balls and other needles (which he said was for B12 and his doctor testified too). Perhaps some evidence, but if we must dismiss Ortiz' genuine failed tests we are setting a very high bar to have a consistent standard (that worst of all things).

I would guess both used, but there is not much against Clemens and I'm having an extremely hard time seeing equal or greater evidence for the villain when we are dismissing failed tests for the hero.

Location: Massachusetts

I'm from Massachusetts, but I'm not sure why that's relevant. Clemens and Ortiz both played for the Red Sox, and Clemens was my favorite pitcher growing up.

More importantly, my position isn't necessarily that Ortiz was clean. It's that we don't know what he tested positive for in 2003, because the results covered a wide range of PEDs -- not just steroids. I'm on record in another HOF thread acknowledging that Ortiz might have used steroids, that MLB probably looked the other way until it couldn't anymore, and that all the elite players suspected of using steroids (including Clemens and Bonds) should be inducted.

Originally Posted by gunboat82

I think it's quite possible that players like Ortiz continued using through retirement and weren't detected. My main point is that it also requires an inference that MLB made a conscious decision to look the other way, knowing full well that players can and do cheat the drug testing. It would mean MLB tested purely for show, to placate the public and perhaps get Congress off their backs.

That wouldn't surprise me at all... professional sports leagues have no guiding principle beyond maximizing profits. But it also makes it extremely difficult for me to condemn known users for violating the "integrity" of the sport, or to give players who flunk the eyeball test a pass. I just think it's logically inconsistent for voters to act like purists when it comes to individual players, while giving a moral pass to MLB, a co-conspirator that reaped the financial benefits of steroids and marketed the hell out of the most prominent users.

Bottom line: I think all the elite performers should be in the Hall, with a notation on their plaques that they played under the cloud of the steroid era. And if we're going to assume that certain players used PEDs after testing was in place, then we should also assume that MLB knew about it and ignored it to protect the product.