August 1, 200521 yr Author Would you stop with your polls? 883186[/snapback] Whats wrong with a poll like this? Its a good question. Dont like it then dont respond.
August 1, 200521 yr You guys are funny... He tested positive ONE TIME... For something that they aren't even giving specifics on. Raffy just released a statement. He's not making any excuses. He admitted that he was careless in taking something he wasn't 100% sure of. He is sticking to the fact that he never took steroids in the past... Some people are so quick to turn on someone. I'd hate to be your friend... One negative thing and you'd start a poll about me. Raffy is absoutely, positively, no question about it... a Hall of Famer.
August 1, 200521 yr Author You guys are funny... He tested positive ONE TIME... For something that they aren't even giving specifics on. Raffy just released a statement. He's not making any excuses. He admitted that he was careless in taking something he wasn't 100% sure of. He is sticking to the fact that he never took steroids in the past... Some people are so quick to turn on someone. I'd hate to be your friend... One negative thing and you'd start a poll about me. Raffy is absoutely, positively, no question about it... a Hall of Famer. 883203[/snapback] That is where you are wrong....this will be debated for a LONG time. :whistle
August 1, 200521 yr Putting Raffy in the HOF basically says if you cheat, who cares!! You can still be in most Holy place in all the game. Putting him in not only would be wrong, but in my mind makes the Hall of Fame no longer matter anymore, because cheaters are allowed in.
August 1, 200521 yr YES, and once everyone settles down i'm sure most of the people voting 'no' will change their minds.
August 2, 200521 yr Author YES, and once everyone settles down i'm sure most of the people voting 'no' will change their minds. 883570[/snapback] No way. Anybody who uses or used roids should not be in the hall.
August 2, 200521 yr Based on his numbers he should definitely be in, so I guess it's more of a question of whether or not any steroid abuser should be in the hall. I guess the same goes for Barry Bonds. 883634[/snapback] i gotta disagree with the barry bonds statement steroids didnt make him a hall of famer they made him a legend if he retired after 2000, he'd get my vote for the hall
August 2, 200521 yr Some Hall of Famers probably used roids, why should Palmerio be penalized because he was caught? At any rate, alot of things come up as positive for steroids like anti-histamine blockers such as Flonase, so I think the media should just calm down for the moment and get all the facts and not stir s*** up in the meantime.
August 2, 200521 yr Palmeiro still worthy of Cooperstown By Jayson Stark ESPN.com There are questions in life I never thought I'd have to answer. And this is one of them: Would I vote for a guy with 3,000 hits and almost 600 homers for the Hall of Fame? Yeah, I would. On the first ballot. And every ballot. It's some kind of commentary on the bizarro world we live in these days that stuff like this is now a subject for serious debate. But steroids have done that for us. It was only a matter of time before some future Hall of Famer tested positive, right? So we'd like to thank Rafael Palmeiro for being the winner of that race. In a way, it's almost fitting. This was, after all, a man who did commercials for the ultimate performance-enhancing drug (Viagra). But Palmeiro was also a man who almost managed to turn himself into one of the good guys of baseball with that finger-pointing performance before Congress. Oops. His life, his career, his legacy will never be the same now. But I'd still vote for him. First ballot. Every ballot. Why? Because I'm not a cop. I'm just a guy who covers baseball for a living. So it's not my job to police this sport. It's the sport's job to police itself. And for 15 years -- maybe 20 -- baseball's police station was a place where the cops just sat around, played cards, smoked cigars and let the inmates hit 900-foot home runs. Baseball's idea of policing itself in the '90s was to allow a whole generation of players to play -- without testing them, without punishing them, without preventing them from bulking up however they wanted. So if they "cheated," it wasn't because I let them cheat. It was because baseball let them cheat. Now it's too late -- for me, for any of us -- to retroactively pronounce these guys guilty of something baseball now considers illegal. It wasn't illegal then. So they took what they took. They did what they did. And now, all I can do as a voter is vote on what they did on the fields they were allowed to play on. Sorry. That's the deal. So all I know is that Rafael Palmeiro had a Hall of Fame career on those fields he was allowed to play on. Even if 3,000 hits and 600 homers don't mean what they used to, they still mean enough that any player who reaches both those plateaus is a Hall of Famer. Even if he once got suspended for testing positive. You know, Gaylord Perry won 300 games in an age when 300 wins didn't mean what it did when Old Hoss Radborn did it, either. But it was still enough wins to make ol' Gaylord a Hall of Famer -- even though he might have been the most proud and famous "cheater" in the history of modern sports. Baseball didn't seem to care if Gaylord Perry cheated for two solid decades. In fact, everyone mostly seemed to find it kind of amusing. So the next thing we knew, his name was showing up on the Hall of Fame ballot. And I figured, if baseball didn't want to stop him from cheating at the time, why would a few thousand Vaseline-balls stop me from voting for him? So I did. I've written about this before, and I've heard from a lot of you who tried to convince me that that was a different form of cheating. This steroid stuff -- it's much more sinister. It's more dangerous to our youth. It's destroying the meaning of the great numbers of baseball. You made those arguments beautifully. I don't disagree with them, either. But I have a problem, as a voter, with using them to justify not voting for the Rafael Palmeiros of our time. The problem is, I still don't know who, from that generation, "cheated" and who didn't. Baseball has provided us with no evidence to go on here. None. It never tested anybody. It never suspended anybody. It never convicted anybody. So it's all guesswork. Are we just going to deny votes to players who showed up in Jose Canseco's book? Or to players who got subpoenaed by Congress? Or to players who gained weight? Or to players who had pimples? What's the magic standard here? We all have players we suspect. But what about all the players we don't suspect? You want to propose some foolproof way to judge? We'd love to have one. But unless it involves the concept of a time machine, don't bother -- because it's too late. Just as we have no idea what other pitchers of Gaylord Perry's generation loaded up the baseball, or scuffed it, or taught it a bunch of Harry Potter tricks, we have no clear idea which players of the '90s "cheated" their way to greatness and which didn't. So are we going to vote for none of them? I've heard some of my fellow writers suggest they might actually do that, to "make a statement." Hey, great. Let them make it. But if they keep some players out of Cooperstown who did it clean, that's wrong, too. And let us remind you of what the always-eloquent Jose Canseco told the Congress of the United States just last March: There's no magic formula that can tell us how many home runs any player would have hit if he hadn't used steroids. Heck, there's no way to know how many he would have hit if the pitchers hadn't been using them, too. And that reminds us: You never hear any outrage about those pitchers, do you? Who knows how many pitchers from The Steroid Era will sail on into the Hall of Fame with pharmaceutically aided numbers? We couldn't tell you how many will -- but we bet it won't be zero. There won't be any cloud hanging over any of those guys, though, because nobody ever gets heated up about what pitchers do. But those criminals who tarnished the hallowed numbers of the Babe and Ted and Willie -- we'll show them. We won't vote for any of them. Sorry. It just isn't rational to selectively pick out a guy here or a guy there -- whether it's based on a positive drug test or a page in somebody's book. There is an argument to be made that what separates Palmeiro from the rest is that he did test positive, so we know what he did. But wait a second. Do we? I'd love to know a whole lot more about what Palmeiro did that caused him to test positive, actually. Not to mention when he did it, how much he did it, how long he did it and exactly how many more hits and homers he hit because he did it. But I'll never get those answers, will I? He'll never tell us everything. And even if he wanted to, even he doesn't know the answer to that last question. And never will. For Rafael Palmeiro, the reverberations of this positive drug test will be shaking his floor for the rest of his life. And should. Unless he spits out a darned compelling explanation for it some day, he deserves all of those reverberations. But the one reverberation he doesn't deserve is to have someone like me look at his name on a Hall of Fame ballot some day and treat it as if he were just another Manny Alexander -- or Jack the Ripper. I wish baseball had taken care of this mess a decade ago. For me. For all of us. But it didn't. So I might not feel the same about him as I felt a week ago. But when that ballot arrives, I'll check off that box next to Rafael Palmeiro's name. First ballot. Every ballot. Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. And that right there pretty much sums it up.
August 2, 200521 yr He shouldn't be a hall of famer regardless. 884472[/snapback] This doesn't have to do with steroids but my feelings that Palmeiro wasn't a HOFer before either: By Rob Neyer ESPN.com senior writer I'm not an idiot. Or maybe I am. Either way, though, I do know that Rafael Palmeiro is a great player. A Hall of Famer, though? It depends on whether or not you think Cooperstown should be overrun by first basemen, and it depends on whether you think the Hall of Fame should be reserved for great players, or for great players. There already are 21 first basemen in the Hall of Fame (including Ernie Banks, who played more games at first base than shortstop, and Rod Carew, who played more games at first base than second). Meanwhile, there are 15 second basemen in the Hall, and only 11 third basemen. I'm not suggesting that electors should strive for equivalency among positions, but does it really make sense to have twice as many first basemen as third basemen? Isn't it likely that we've probably been overvaluing first basemen and undervaluing third basemen? So if we're going to elect yet another first baseman to the Hall of Fame, shouldn't we start with the best first baseman who's not already in? And so instead of looking at Palmeiro's career in a vacuum, shouldn't we also look at Palmeiro's contemporaries, and try to figure out if he's the best, or at least close to the best, among them? It's pretty clear that Palmeiro isn't the best first baseman in the game today, and probably hasn't ever been. Over the last decade, Palmeiro ranks behind Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, Jason Giambi, Jim Thome, and perhaps Todd Helton. Bagwell's finished in the top 10 in voting for the NL MVP six times, including first-, second-, and third-place finishes. Thomas has finished in the top 10 in voting for the AL MVP eight times, including two first-, one second-, and two third-place finishes. Giambi hasn't been around for long, but he already has an MVP award and a second-place showing. Meanwhile, Palmeiro has finished among the top 10 in MVP balloting three times: in 1993, he finished eighth; in 1996, sixth; and in 1999, fifth. Why hasn't Palmeiro even sniffed an MVP award? Sure, it's partly because he hasn't played for the right teams at the right time. But mostly it's because while Palmeiro has obviously been a great hitter for a long time, there have been a lot of great hitters -- or rather, there have been a lot of great numbers -- in recent years. How many great seasons has Palmeiro enjoyed, relative to his peers? He has, in his long career, led his league in a hitting category three times. In 1990, he led the American League with 191 hits. In 1991, he led the American League with 49 doubles. And in 1993, he led the American League with 124 runs. In none of those seasons could he, by any stretch of the imagination, have been considered the best hitter in the American League. As a hitter, Palmeiro's best season was probably 1999, when he placed fifth (his best finish ever) in the MVP balloting, and ranked second in the league with a .630 slugging percentage, second with 47 home runs, second with 148 RBI, and ninth with a .391 on-base percentage. Even with all that, Palmeiro wasn't the best hitter in the league (that was Manny Ramirez), nor was he among the top three players (in addition to Ramirez, Roberto Alomar and Derek Jeter were both better than Palmeiro, and Bernie Williams, Nomar Garciaparra, and Ken Griffey were just as good). Look at the hitters in the Hall of Fame (or at least the hitters in the Hall of Fame who deserve to be in the Hall of Fame). The great majority of them could claim, for at least a season or two, to rank among the very best players in their league. Or, at the very least, to consistently rank among the very best players at their position. But it's hard to convincingly argue that Palmeiro has generally ranked among the game's best players, or even among the game's very best first basemen. And you know what? I haven't even mentioned Fred McGriff, whose career numbers are strikingly similar to Palmeiro's. If you're going to vote for Palmeiro, then you have to vote for McGriff (and his six top-10 MVP finishes). Along with Bagwell and Thomas and Thome and (maybe) Giambi and Helton. Perhaps Rafael Palmeiro belongs in the Hall of Fame. But let's give this a few years, and look at his career in the context of other great first basemen of the late 20th and early 21st century. Because if he's only the sixth- or seventh-best first baseman of his era, he doesn't belong in the Hall.
August 2, 200521 yr Well, he's not in there, and he wasn't a sure-fire lock to be there before this. Yes, I think it hurts his chances, but it shouldn't keep him out. We're not talking about this guy becoming a behemoth like Giambi or Canseco, and you could make a case that the fact that he's played in hitter friendly ballparks for his career inflated his numbers more than steroids could have. Honestly, I don't have a huge problem with this stuff because steroids don't help you hit a curve-ball, and any event can have an asterick. I mean, should the "shot heard 'round the world" not count because the pitch's sign was stolen allowing Thompson to know what was coming? Or should Babe Ruth's records be tainted because when he played, it was with segregation still in full force? Yeah, it sucks to think that Palmeiro's numbers could be tainted, but I think numbers from any era can be tainted if you look hard enough for a reason.
August 2, 200521 yr No. Simply because all the talk about him is getting in the way of actually enjoying the game of baseball and it is his fault. I hate when commentators and sports analysts talk about steroids every five seconds on TV.
August 2, 200521 yr Palmeiro still worthy of Cooperstown By Jayson Stark ESPN.com There are questions in life I never thought I'd have to answer. And this is one of them: Would I vote for a guy with 3,000 hits and almost 600 homers for the Hall of Fame? Yeah, I would. On the first ballot. And every ballot. It's some kind of commentary on the bizarro world we live in these days that stuff like this is now a subject for serious debate. But steroids have done that for us. It was only a matter of time before some future Hall of Famer tested positive, right? So we'd like to thank Rafael Palmeiro for being the winner of that race. In a way, it's almost fitting. This was, after all, a man who did commercials for the ultimate performance-enhancing drug (Viagra). But Palmeiro was also a man who almost managed to turn himself into one of the good guys of baseball with that finger-pointing performance before Congress. Oops. His life, his career, his legacy will never be the same now. But I'd still vote for him. First ballot. Every ballot. Why? Because I'm not a cop. I'm just a guy who covers baseball for a living. So it's not my job to police this sport. It's the sport's job to police itself. And for 15 years -- maybe 20 -- baseball's police station was a place where the cops just sat around, played cards, smoked cigars and let the inmates hit 900-foot home runs. Baseball's idea of policing itself in the '90s was to allow a whole generation of players to play -- without testing them, without punishing them, without preventing them from bulking up however they wanted. So if they "cheated," it wasn't because I let them cheat. It was because baseball let them cheat. Now it's too late -- for me, for any of us -- to retroactively pronounce these guys guilty of something baseball now considers illegal. It wasn't illegal then. So they took what they took. They did what they did. And now, all I can do as a voter is vote on what they did on the fields they were allowed to play on. Sorry. That's the deal. So all I know is that Rafael Palmeiro had a Hall of Fame career on those fields he was allowed to play on. Even if 3,000 hits and 600 homers don't mean what they used to, they still mean enough that any player who reaches both those plateaus is a Hall of Famer. Even if he once got suspended for testing positive. You know, Gaylord Perry won 300 games in an age when 300 wins didn't mean what it did when Old Hoss Radborn did it, either. But it was still enough wins to make ol' Gaylord a Hall of Famer -- even though he might have been the most proud and famous "cheater" in the history of modern sports. Baseball didn't seem to care if Gaylord Perry cheated for two solid decades. In fact, everyone mostly seemed to find it kind of amusing. So the next thing we knew, his name was showing up on the Hall of Fame ballot. And I figured, if baseball didn't want to stop him from cheating at the time, why would a few thousand Vaseline-balls stop me from voting for him? So I did. I've written about this before, and I've heard from a lot of you who tried to convince me that that was a different form of cheating. This steroid stuff -- it's much more sinister. It's more dangerous to our youth. It's destroying the meaning of the great numbers of baseball. You made those arguments beautifully. I don't disagree with them, either. But I have a problem, as a voter, with using them to justify not voting for the Rafael Palmeiros of our time. The problem is, I still don't know who, from that generation, "cheated" and who didn't. Baseball has provided us with no evidence to go on here. None. It never tested anybody. It never suspended anybody. It never convicted anybody. So it's all guesswork. Are we just going to deny votes to players who showed up in Jose Canseco's book? Or to players who got subpoenaed by Congress? Or to players who gained weight? Or to players who had pimples? What's the magic standard here? We all have players we suspect. But what about all the players we don't suspect? You want to propose some foolproof way to judge? We'd love to have one. But unless it involves the concept of a time machine, don't bother -- because it's too late. Just as we have no idea what other pitchers of Gaylord Perry's generation loaded up the baseball, or scuffed it, or taught it a bunch of Harry Potter tricks, we have no clear idea which players of the '90s "cheated" their way to greatness and which didn't. So are we going to vote for none of them? I've heard some of my fellow writers suggest they might actually do that, to "make a statement." Hey, great. Let them make it. But if they keep some players out of Cooperstown who did it clean, that's wrong, too. And let us remind you of what the always-eloquent Jose Canseco told the Congress of the United States just last March: There's no magic formula that can tell us how many home runs any player would have hit if he hadn't used steroids. Heck, there's no way to know how many he would have hit if the pitchers hadn't been using them, too. And that reminds us: You never hear any outrage about those pitchers, do you? Who knows how many pitchers from The Steroid Era will sail on into the Hall of Fame with pharmaceutically aided numbers? We couldn't tell you how many will -- but we bet it won't be zero. There won't be any cloud hanging over any of those guys, though, because nobody ever gets heated up about what pitchers do. But those criminals who tarnished the hallowed numbers of the Babe and Ted and Willie -- we'll show them. We won't vote for any of them. Sorry. It just isn't rational to selectively pick out a guy here or a guy there -- whether it's based on a positive drug test or a page in somebody's book. There is an argument to be made that what separates Palmeiro from the rest is that he did test positive, so we know what he did. But wait a second. Do we? I'd love to know a whole lot more about what Palmeiro did that caused him to test positive, actually. Not to mention when he did it, how much he did it, how long he did it and exactly how many more hits and homers he hit because he did it. But I'll never get those answers, will I? He'll never tell us everything. And even if he wanted to, even he doesn't know the answer to that last question. And never will. For Rafael Palmeiro, the reverberations of this positive drug test will be shaking his floor for the rest of his life. And should. Unless he spits out a darned compelling explanation for it some day, he deserves all of those reverberations. But the one reverberation he doesn't deserve is to have someone like me look at his name on a Hall of Fame ballot some day and treat it as if he were just another Manny Alexander -- or Jack the Ripper. I wish baseball had taken care of this mess a decade ago. For me. For all of us. But it didn't. So I might not feel the same about him as I felt a week ago. But when that ballot arrives, I'll check off that box next to Rafael Palmeiro's name. First ballot. Every ballot. Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. And that right there pretty much sums it up. 885134[/snapback] No, it really doesn't. Stark is way off base here. Yes, their was a lot of cheating in baseball for close to 2 decades, but now those who have done it (and are STILL doing it) need to be kept out of the Hall of Fame. Cheating has been rewarded for too long, and it needs to stop.
August 3, 200521 yr Some Hall of Famers probably used roids, why should Palmerio be penalized because he was caught? At any rate, alot of things come up as positive for steroids like anti-histamine blockers such as Flonase, so I think the media should just calm down for the moment and get all the facts and not stir s*** up in the meantime. 885024[/snapback] He was taking Winstrol, which is a pretty potent drug used by veterinarians on animals.
August 3, 200521 yr I say yes, because steroids don't garuntee hits (See Giambi last 2 years) and Palmeiro had 3000 of them...
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