The Baseball Thread

McGriff and McGwire are steroid-era tainted. Time and more investigation will sort that out.

Include Foster? He had some good stats on a great team (as did Rice). How many 300+ seasons?

Pete Rose's destruction of Ray Fosse's as catcher while diving into him at the plate in 1971 All-star game. After this fiasco, Fosse's playing ability and career spiraled downward.

Arguably, Ray Fosse is most famous for being bowled over by the Cincinnati Reds' Pete Rose at home plate in the last play of the 1970 All-Star Game. Rose scored the winning run, while the collision separated Fosse's right shoulder. The injury is often incorrectly cited as what caused the downfall of Fosse's career. In reality, Fosse played 42 games in the second half of 1970, and was an All-Star again in 1971....

What effectively ended Fosse's career happened in 1974, Fosse, by then an Oakland Athletic, suffered a far worse injury than a dislocated shoulder. On June 5 he suffered a crushed disk in his neck attempting to break up a clubhouse fight between teammates Reggie Jackson and Billy North. He was on the disabled list for three months.

Also, gambling or no gambling...it's possible Pete Rose might not be considered worthy of HOF - for being the best Singles-Hitter? Shakey reasoning at best when you consider that Pete Rose made the most outs in MLB history with 9,797.

Isn't this what a player is supposed to do -- steal when you can steal? Let's suppose, if home base was uncovered defensively, should he stand there and NOT run to steal home? I'm just sayin'.

Equally hypocritical is Rule 5 of the hall’s election requirements, the character clause, which specifies that admission should be based not just on a player’s record and ability but also on his integrity, sportsmanship and virtue. This is the bar that has been used to exclude Pete Rose (gambling) and Mark McGwire (performance-enhancing drugs), along with troublesome, mouthy characters like Dave Parker and Dick Allen, and that may eventually be used to banish Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and anyone else tainted by accusations of steroid use.

But the brand of moralizing practiced by the Hall of Fame has always been highly selective and inconsistent. At the time of the annual induction ceremony in 2007, Mr. Chafets writes, the hall included “a convicted drug dealer, a reformed cokehead who narrowly beat a lifetime suspension from baseball, a celebrated sex addict, an Elders of Zion conspiracy nut, a pitcher who wrote a book about how he cheated his way into the hall, a well-known and highly arrested drunk driver and a couple of nasty beanball artists.”

That’s just among the living members. The roster of deceased immortals (some inducted before the character clause went into effect) includes Ty Cobb, one of the very first members, famously a sociopath, possibly a murderer and a notorious racist who was also a card-carrying, torch-waving member of the Klu Klux Klan, as were Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby. The hall is full of gamblers, brawlers and defendants in paternity suits, and there are numerous drunks, starting with Grover Cleveland Alexander, who Bill Veeck, the colorful baseball executive, once said pitched better drunk than sober.

So for Rose (even after possible pardoning), is NOT a shoe-in for HOF..unless you get Foster and a slew of others in HOF ahead of Rose.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but the rule you quoted still doesn't exclude those who attempt the "Henderson crouch".

Who says he's clean now?

now clean, he's a shell of his former juiced-up self...