Hall of Fame thoughts: Selig and the steroid players

The deadline has passed for the writers to turn in their Hall of Fame ballots, but I'll keep writing about the Hall because

• the Twins haven't given me a reason to change topics
• I have more to say and
• it's my blog and you can't stop me.

Don't understand Hall voters changing opinion on Bonds/Clemens because of Selig's election. He was elected by Veterans committee, not BBWAA

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 30, 2016

Yes, but ... a fairly vocal contingent of writers have for years been calling for the Hall to provide explicit guidance on steroid users and steroid suspects. Ignore the topic or bar the door? The Hall has declined to do so. The long time sentence in the voting rules remains:

Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

For many of the electorate, the words "integity" and "character" justify passing over the likes of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and other suspected or acknowledged steroid users. Others don't, particularly of those who were (or may have) used in the no-test era. The people who run the Hall of Fame have left that decision up to the voters.

But those same people have a heavy thumb on the Veterans Committee scale. The ever-changing rules and composition of the panels make that entry to enshrinement much easier to manipulate. Marvin Miller, for example, isn't in because the various panels given the task of judging him over the years have always been loaded with enough management figures to ensure that the union boss wasn't going to slip in. (The commissioner's office doesn't directly run the Hall, but the Hall likes to be liked by the commissioner's office.)

And the Veterans Committee in recent years has seen fit to slide two notable steroid enablers and beneficiaries, Selig and Tony LaRussa, in.

That's not an explicit endorsement of steroid users, but it's an implicit one. Had the Hall wanted to demonstrate a hard line on PEDs. it could have set up those panels accordingly. It didn't.

Notes,quotes and comment

It's a fairly quiet time around MLB -- almost like everybody is holding their collective breath waiting for today's Hall of Fame announcement before continuing with their offseason chores -- but there are a few little items lying around ....

* Ryan Howard of the Phillies and Ryan Zimmerman of the Nationals on Tuesday sued Al-Jazeera America for libel over its report linking them (and the NFL's Peyton Manning and others) to performance enhancing drugs. Meanwhile, the New York Times had this piece connecting the Al-Jazeera source (Charles Sly) to a fitness trainer (Jason Riley) who has worked with several athlete Sly claimed in the report to have gotten PEDs. Sly and Riley are business partners. There may well be some fire to this smoke,

* The Twins last winter dropped their longtime Double A affiliation with what was then the New Britain (Conn,) Rock Cats and linked up with the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Lookouts. The RockCats are now officially the Hartford Yard Goats, and they are apparently homeless for the start of the 2016 season, with the promised new stadium bearing some $10 million in overruns and the developer and city at loggerheads. The Twins may have seen this mess coming and gotten out of the way.

* Paul DePosesta, who was briefly general manager of the Dodgers (at probably the worst time to be the general manager of the Dodgers in the last 50 years or more) and pioneered the influx of Ivy Leaguers into MLB, left the New York Mets to work for the Cleveland Browns, where he will have the title of "chief strategy officer." That title apparently means something, but I'm not sure exactly what.

DePosesta played football for Harvard and, apparently, only got into baseball because he couldn't land a job with an NFL team. In baseball, he was something of a pioneer in the use of analytics, starting with the Cleveland Indians and then moving on to Oakland (where he was a significant character in Michael Lewis' celebrated Moneyball book; he was the basis for the Jonah Hill character in the movie and the one character who the moviemakers gave a different name), the Dodgers, the Padres and the Mets.

He was seen as a possible successor to Sandy Alderson with the Mets, and Alderson is dealing with cancer right now, so his departure might be a bit of a headache for the defending NL champs.

The Browns, as I understand it, are considered a laughingstock around the NFL. So were the Mets when DePosesta got there; #LOLMets used to be a frequent Twitter hashtag. Nobody's laughing at the Mets now.

A kinda, sorta suspension

Edinson Volquez, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, was suspended for 50 games Tuesday after flunking a drug test.

Kind of suspended. Sort of suspended. He couldn't pitch this week, or next month, or even in July if he weren't suspended. He's recovering from Tommy John surgery.

For the record, as reported in the link above, the 2008 All-Star blames his positive test on fertility treatments. I'm in no position to judge the veracity of that statement.

But there's another possible reason, one that strikes at the value of this suspension.

Many of the players who have admitted using steroids, human growth hormone or other barred "performance enhancing drugs" say they did so in hopes of speeding and enhancing their recovery from injuries.

So ... you are a pitcher who has undergone ligament replacement surgery. You know you're not going to pitch for at least a year, maybe more. You believe that taking a banned substance will hasten that process. You also know that if you take it and test positive, the suspension will take effect while you're out of action.

True, baseball's drug suspensions, unlike its run-of-the-mill suspensions, are payless. (Players cannot be suspended without pay because in a bygone era owners would effectively cut players' pay with trumped-up suspensions.) Volquez will lose some $137,000 as a result of this suspension, and for most of us, that's significant money. On the other hand, if breaking the rule allows him to return with his considerable talent intact, he'll make that money back with interest.

So what has he lost by juicing? Nothing, really. A 50-game suspension is supposed to rip a role in a player's season, or even his career, but in this case the hole was already there.

There is a group of players I simply assume are or have been users on this basis. I won't identify the criteria for that group because I'm not interested in libeling anybody, and I don't know that the entire group has/does use. That some have is a matter of record.

For what it's worth, Volquez does not fit the criteria. But that a player with his injury used should not be surprising, in part because the penalties in place for violation aren't much of a deterrent.

The big why

It has long struck me that the missing element in the issue of performance-enhancing drugs — in baseball and other sports — has been a public examination, by the athletes involved, of the ethics. The big why, if you will.

The surest sign that the players always regarded PED use as unethical was, and is, the secrecy surrounding it. A pitcher gets a cortisone shot for his sore shoulder, it's known. Same pitcher gets human growth hormone for the same injury, he's not letting anybody know it.

Here, from the Chicago Sun-Times, is a first-person account of his own big why from Jim Parque, who went 31-34 over six major league seasons around the turn of the millennium, mostly with the White Sox.

And here is a piece on the reaction from the White Sox clubhouse. Ozzie Guillen's comment ... well, that's Ozzie.