MLBTR Chat Transcript

@FredMcGriff: Mark didn’t exactly say he would never vote for steroid abusers. He kind of said the opposite. What he essentially said was that he would vote for the maximum 10 players on the ballot and if he found 10 players he thought were hall of fame worthy and clean he would vote for them ahead of the juicers. If you look at the ballot though, there are never 10 clean players who are hall of fame worthy. What Mark would end up doing is voting for all the clean players he thought should be in and then fill up the remainder of the 10 spots with juicers. Using his logic my guess is Mark would be voting for several known juicers every single year.

@ Vizionaire: You night be right that we don’t know every single player that juiced. There are still plenty of players who we know for a fact did use steroids and lied about it. We all know for a 100% fact that Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGuire, Sheffield, A-Rod,Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and probably several others on the ballot used steroids. They all lied about it at some point, too. Just because you can’t be 100% certain that you can keep every last juicer out (several are already in) is no reason to just let all of them in no holds barred.

Most of those guys, at some point in their careers, took a job and/or major league roster spot away from a clean player trying to do it the right way. There are definitely dozens if not hundreds of clean players who are dead broke right now and had their major league opportunity, roster spot and salary taken away by a dirty player. That in and of itself is so egregious it’s plenty of reason alone to keep someone out of the hall.

The worst part about it is a lot of those dirty players were stealing roster spots by extending their careers and playing at a much older age than they would have been able to if they were clean. That means when they were already multimillionaires when they were taking the salaries away from clean guys who likely had no money at all. Talk about the rich stealing from the poor. The owners may have a lot more money than the players but at least the major league players are millionaires. The dirty players were worth tens of millions and they were stealing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from people who almost literally had no money at all. There’s something really dirty about millionaires cheating to steal the salary away from someone who is actually broke.

Think about the guys that would have made a few hundred thousand or even a few million dollars but now their families have next to nothing because someone like Bonds decided to stick a needle in his arm and take his roster spot when, as a clean player, Bonds would have already been washed up at 40 and the clean player would have had his shot. It’s not just Bonds. It’s tons of players that did that to tons of people and their families. All when they already had millions of dollars in their own bank accounts and knew they could live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

From a personal standpoint, I have no issues with someone using a drug that is bad for them. They are hurting themselves and I don’t think we need to try and police people to protect them from themselves. It should be their own choice. Once doing that starts taking away entire careers, jobs and salaries from people who want to be clean it becomes a real problem though. No clean player should have to compete against a steroid abuser to get a job in the majors.