I have long been an advocate of Jeff Kent getting into Cooperstown. He is the best power-hitting second baseman of all time.
His 354 career HR are 19 more than the twice-suspended Robinson Cano (PEDs) and 79 more than Ryne Sandberg, who is currently third on the list.
His .865 career OPS is fourth all time at second base, behind only Rogers Hornsby, Jackie Robinson and Charlie Gehringer.
Kent was a 5x All-Star, 4x Silver Slugger, MVP winner, and had 3 additional top-9 MVP finishes. He add over 100 RBI
8 times in 9 years (with 93 in the other in which he only played 130 games. He was the best offensive force at second base of his era, and of several eras. Kent was always deserving, and he is finally in Cooperstown where he belongs, earning 14 of a possible 16 votes on the Eras Committee.
That was the only thing voters got right Sunday night. The rest was an abject failure of biblical proportions.
Voters continue to fail the baseball public by denying the greatest hitter of all time, Barry Bonds, and the most awarded pitcher of all time, Roger Clemens, as inductees of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
They do this because of the presumption that both were users of performance-enhancing drugs at a time when Major League Baseball not only had no policy on PEDs but actually encouraged the usage of them as the league sought to rebound from the devastating impact of the 1994 players strike.
MLB was hurting at the gate, television numbers were down, and they needed something to spark interest. What saved baseball? The long ball.
The 1998 HR chase of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire sparked the highly successful “Chicks Dig the Long Ball” campaign. ESPN was breaking in on every McGwire and Sosa AB. The coverage was everywhere, and baseball was back, baby!
If you watched that chase as intently as I did, you may remember Mark McGwire doing interviews at his locker with a tub of “andro” (androstenedione) in it. I had never heard of andro before, but seeing it in Big Mac’s locker had me going down to GNC to get a tub of it for $40. Andro, of course, is a PED.
Androstenedione is a naturally occurring steroid hormone and prohormone that the body then converts to testosterone and estrogen. The sale of andro was legal in the U.S. until April 2004.
Baseball had no problem looking the other way on PEDs. The spike in HRs was leading to record gates and viewerships. Players were encouraged to use whatever means necessary to achieve these bigger HR totals and were rewarded with massive new contracts for doing so, even if the big bump only lasted for one season. Owners didn’t care about the old records or the PEDs (nor the health of the players they were happy to chew up and spit out), all they cared about was the record money that was flowing.
MLB saw $1.88B in revenue in 1993, the year before the player’s strike brought on by the conspiracy of a group led by White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, Brewers owner Bud Selig and Twins owner Carl Pohlad. (Reinsdorf and Selig, of course, were primary culprits in MLB Collusion as well.)
With the player’s strike brought on by the new, hardline approach of new Commissioner Bud Selig and led by his partner in crime Reinsdorf, revenues dropped to $1.2B in 1994 with the cancellation of regular season games and a lost postseason.
It would take until 1997 when the league finally exceeded it’s revenues from 1993, when it hit $2B in revenue for the first time. MLB would see a steady stream upward from 1998 ($2.2B) to 2005 ($4.5B) as the long balls were cranking every year.
In March 2005, Congress threatened MLB’s prized antitrust exemption if they didn’t come down harder on players using PEDs. After initially rebuffing Congressional calls for a PED policy to stamp out steroid usage, MLB finally caved in 2005. In the policy that would take place for the start of the 2005 season, a first time offender would be suspended 10 games, a second positive would be 30 games, a third would cost a player 60 games, a fourth would be a one year suspension. Players were tested once per year, and some players could be tested multiple times.
The first player suspended under the 2005 policy? It was a 5’ 10”, 180 pound light hitting outfielder named Alex Sanchez. Sanchez has 4 home runs in his 355 games (1,351 AB) over the previous 4 seasons. He took an over-the-counter supplement that recently been banned under the new policy and failed to check the supplement against the new list. He was a singles hitter with a lot of speed, and not a power hitter as usually associated with PEDs.
Baseball has since made pariahs of the very men who saved their game from their own shortsightedness (the dismissal of Vincent to make the Commissionership an employee of baseball and not an arbiter of the sport, the hardline stance changing the negotiations with players to that point after Vincent’s dismissal, the lack of understanding what the loss of games and a cancelled postseason would mean for baseball’s economics and for its relationship with the MLBPA).
Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens – these men were the greatest players of the generation and among the greatest players of all time. Pretending they don’t exist over a false sense of dignity (remember, MLB originally didn’t want to have a steroids policy and told Congress so) in order to start on some moral soap box is the most perplexing stance they can take.
Those games happened. The records are real. To act as though that era of baseball happened without it’s greatest players is a colossal joke. To only hold players accountable (even without failing a PED test administered by MLB) while owners raked in the money and took no responsibility is hypocrisy at its absolute narcissistic finest.
That the Eras Committee failed to give either Barry Bonds (66% of vote in his final year of standard eligibility) or Clemens (65.2% in his final year) the required 5 votes (out of 16) to keep them eligible for the next ballot is a disgrace. As a result, neither will be eligible until 2031.
The other most deserving player on the ballot, 1B Carlos Delgado, received 9 votes. Delgado was a tremendous offensive force hitting 30+ HR 11 times (including 10 years in a row) and drove in 100+ RBI 8 times in 9 years (the one time he didn’t reach 100 RBI, he had 99) and 9 times overall.
Delgado was still a highly productive player when a torn labrum in his hip and multiple surgeries ended his career at least 2 years earlier than it should have ended. He finished his career with 473 HR, 1,512 RBI and a .929 OPS. His final full season in 2008: .271 AVG, .353 OBP, .871 OPS, 38HR, 115 RBI. He finished 9th in MVP. He played 26 games in 2009 before the injury ended his career.
A consistent power force for 13 years, Delgado was the next most deserving player on the ballot. At least he can still be discussed in three years.
The outpouring of sentiment for Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy is exactly that, sentiment. Players who were briefly great but couldn’t maintain the level they had.
Mattingly had an incredible 4 year stretch as one of the most feared hitters in the American League. Mattingly won 3 Gold Gloves, 3 Silver Sluggers, was a 4-time All Star, won an MVP and finished in the top 7 MVP in all three other years.
Don then suffered a back injury that would forever alter the course of his career, sapping his once prodigious power. He was still an elite defensive player, but after 4 straight years of OPS between .918 and a league leading .967, he would never post an OPS over .828 again. In 4 of his final 6 seasons, he would have an OPS under .755 and post single digit HRs. Mattingly retired at 34 with a .307 career average and 222 career HR.
Murphy was an absolute monster for 6 straight seasons, and his case is stronger than Mattingly’s. Murphy won back-to-back MVP awards in 1982-83. from 1982-1987, Murphy was a 6-time All Star, won 5 Gold Gloves and 4 Silver Sluggers, with two more Top-9 MVP finishes. He led the NL in several categories from 1982-85.
However Murphy’s career took a hard dive in 1988 at age 32. After averaging over 36 HR per season for 6 years, he would never hit 25 in a season again. His average plummeted from .295 in 1987 to .226 in 1988. An on-base machine for 6 seasons, his OBP fell from .417 in 1987 to .313 in 1988, and he would never have an OBP above .318 over a season again. Murphy retired in 1993 just 2 HR short of the cherished 400 HR club with 398. He had a career .265 AVG with 1,266 career RBI.
Both Mattingly and Murphy received more votes than Bonds and Clemens did. Another example of why the voting committees have grossly failed the baseball public. In no world were the careers of Mattingly and Murphy better than those of Bonds and Clemens.
The job of the Baseball Hall is to tell the story of the history of baseball. Sometimes the story has some hair and warts, but it is the story all the same.
The story of baseball cannot be told without it’s all-time HR king and only 7-time MVP. It cannot be told without it’s only 7-time Cy Young award winner. The only answer is because they have feelings of some sort of way about those players.
As a baseball fan, I don’t care about your feelings. I care about the game’s greats being a part of the the fabric of it’s story.
It’s yet another year where we, as baseball fans, get screwed again.
