McGwire and the Hall of Fame

Sports Illustrated online ran an Associated Press story last night that said that around only one in four of eligible voters plan to vote Mark McGwire into the Hall of Fame.

We can’t know everything that goes on behind the scenes but what bothers me about this, if McGwire doesn’t make it on the first ballot, is that he will be subject to two things: (a) the voters will presume that Jose Canseco's allegations mixed with McGwire not denying before Congress that he used steroids means that he must be guilty of using them and (b) McGwire happens to be the unlucky first significant player the voters can use as an example to demonstrate protest against baseball itself for being too slow to have reacted on the steroids issue.

We've evolved to be a society that presumes that a non-denial means that a person is automatically guilty of something that may be even beyond the question the person was actually asked. There are many legal reasons why a player like McGwire might not have denied using steroids, among them possibly that he used legal drugs (such as Androstenedione) that could arguably later be legally and retroactively grouped among other steroids and he wouldn’t want to perjure himself for no good reason. Under oath, we obviously must choose our words carefully and there was no legal benefit, other than for testifying on his behalf in the court of public opinion, to admit or deny using anything when he was asked in Congress. By answering that he didn’t want to talk about the past, he may have taken the safe, legal route in his answer but destroyed himself in that court of public perception. Even while I tend to make that same presumption the writers are here, about people who won’t deny what they are accused of, he was in a particularly delicate environment and he chose his answer carefully. I gravitate toward the same theory about why he wouldn't deny it but we must remind ourselves of where he was and how the question deserves careful legal consideration before it can be answered one way or the other.

In any case, baseball has a set of rules and a governing body and McGwire never was found to have seriously violated them while playing. Rafael Palmeiro, even though he denied using steroids, falls into a different category. Even with his denial, he did for whatever reason, fail baseball's drug-testing policy and played at least part of his career in an era when drugs that he tested positive for were banned under the rules of the game. It’s as if the writers are now saying that they are retroactively going to apply today’s rules to the era in which McGwire played and find him guilty of violating the 2006 rules during his playing career. That’s what doesn’t sit well with me when I read the many openly expressed reasons why some of the writers won’t vote for him.

Steroid use may have been morally questionable, may even have been illegal but they weren’t against the rules. They were against the rules under other sports and against baseball rules in other leagues outside of MLB but it seems that some writers are suggesting that because international bodies in other baseball venues had banned steroids at the time, that means that they were implicitly against MLB's rules. Rules are negotiated with the player's union and until you have a rule, it's not a rule. Players can be suspended for all sorts of acts that aren't listed specifically in the rules, and they often are, but McGwire was never suspended for steroid use.

Character is mentioned on the Hall of Fame ballot, as the AP story reminds us. Does an unwillingness to deny talking about one’s own career, after it is over, or for that matter invoking the fifth amendment in a court of law if it comes to that, immediately and automatically confirm a lack of character? I don’t pretend to know the answer to this question but it’s one worth considering as it apparently will have to be the grounds on which voters deny McGwire entry into the Hall. In the performance categories, I suspect most (but not all) voters would concede his results are undeniably worthy of entry.

There's a principle often applied to the US constitution which I would like to see applied to the Hall of Fame and that is that the constitution needs to be interpreted to be consistent with itself so that no interpretation can involve contradicting another active part. In that respect, the voters who are considering Mark McGwire, and who don't reject his career accomplishments on their own merit, could weigh whether he is more in violation of some moral or ethical code under the character clause than, say, Gaylord Perry. Perry is in the Hall of Fame and has admitted to constantly violating baseball's rules throughout his career by doctoring the baseball. He has admitted that his ultimate results were improved significantly by these activities but he remains in the Hall of Fame. Applying some sort of consistency principle would have us weigh McGwire's alleged infractions against Perry's to see whether Perry deserves to be there but McGwire doesn't.

If McGwire is to be denied admission to the Hall based on character, then it needs to be that the voters decide that even without conviction, that he committed a crime off the field that wasn’t specifically prohibited by baseball rules but because it was illegal, even in the absence of a conviction, it was so unquestionably immoral that he deserves to be denied on the basis of character.

It’s a delicate game to play when you hold someone to task for what they say or don’t say after their career ends. If they die the day after they retire, and thus say nothing more, is their career any less or more than it was? I would argue that only if somehow we discover new evidence that the performance involved direct cheating under the rules of the day, should we perhaps go back and revise our opinion of performance. If McGwire had admitted using steroids, that would be a different condition but even then, still not against baseball’s rules at the time. If he had been convicted in criminal or even civil court of a serious infraction, something entirely outside of baseball even, that goes to the character issue. If he had been shown to have violated a rule in accumulating his totals, again we have more strength to our argument. If his ultimate results on the field were being questioned, we have more ammunition. I see none of that being used in this debate.

I don’t get a vote and that may be fortunate because weighing all of the factors would be difficult, at best. I don't pretend to know if McGwire should be in the Hall of Fame. But I would be inclined not to deny a player entry into the Hall simply because I think he probably did something that was against the moral code of some, not against the rules and not admitted, denied or proven with absolute certainty either way.