Griffey, Jr. and Piazza Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame

Two players on different sides of the performance-enhancing drugs saga of the turn-of-the-century in  Major League Baseball, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza, have been elected to this year's Baseball Hall of Fame by the designated sports writers.  Griffey, who had hit 630 home runs over the course of his illustrious career, avoided the steroids, human growth hormone, and other supplements that others used to enhance their statistics and prolong their careers.  Piazza, while not engaging in anything illegal or prohibited, did nevertheless reveal later in his autobiography that he used a then-legal muscle-building substance during his playing days.  But to me and many others, he was not cheating but rather using the resources that were then available to him.  He was one of the best hitting catchers of all time, hitting 427 career home runs...

Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, two players with amazing careers but both with serious allegations of having used performance-enhancing drugs levelled against them (neither officially convicted of the infractions), were also on the ballot but neither could muster enough votes for election.  They both will have the opportunity to try again...for another six years...before their names get removed from consideration.

I wish the whole steroid/HGH scandal never happened in Major League Baseball...it certainly cast a shadow over the vaunted season and career home run records, now dominated by suspected abusers.  I will say one thing at least about career records, though: baseball is a peculiar business...in the early 1920s they introduced a livelier ball to enhance run production...which happened to coincide with the start of Babe Ruth's amassing of his 714 home runs.  Then, following the 1968 season, heavily dominated by pitching, the pitching mound was lowered in order to give batters more opportunities for hits.  In both of these times, career statistics were naturally affected.  In the early 1960s the regular season was expanded from 154 to 162 games.  And with expansion over the years, the number of teams grew from 16 to 30...giving a lot more opportunities for statistics to be padded while playing against mediocre competition. But the greatest factor I see that makes me want to place a caveat on career statistics in baseball is the racial segregation that ruled the sport until Jackie Robinson's entry in 1947.  Babe Ruth may not have used steroids, but he also didn't play against the best competition in accomplishing his feat, either.  And those blacks who were excluded from the majors all those decades will never achieve the deserved recognition of their skill and accomplishments due to this injustice.  If we're going to talk about Barry Bonds hitting 73 home runs in a season or having 762 career round-trippers and whether those records are legitimate, I say let's first have a discussion about all of the records made during the vast segregation era...