Baseball Hall of Fame '13: Who gets the call?

[Bloody Sox]

Somebody with a voice who gets it

http://espn.go.com/mlb/hof13/story/_/id ... ll-fame-be

+1

[kaiser]

Nate Silver, statistics guru of the New York Times, addressed the HOF Steroids question the other day in a Q&A, and I thought his answer was insightful:

Q.
Would you vote for Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens to get into the Hall of Fame?

A.
Yes, I think, in large part because the split-the-baby solutions to steroids use are hard to apply in practice. I might use steroids use as a tiebreaker for otherwise very close cases (and I think McGwire, Sosa and Palmeiro all fall into that category). But I don't think people should pretend that we can put each player's stats through some kind of algorithm and come up with "steroid-neutral" statistics. We just don't know all that much about who did and didn't use steroids, and when.

[Ender]

I heard a comment on TV that kind of swayed my mind a little bit. It was basically that players have always used whatever they could get their hands on to cheat in baseball. Greenies, scuffing the ball etc. A lot of these players are in the HOF right now. I would assume that these same players would have used steroids if they could get their hands on them but they just weren't available at the time. So if we leave guys out because of steroids there are probably dozens or more of other HOFs that probably shouldn't be in there in the first place. I would be much more inclined to penalize someone for using steroids than to completely refuse to vote them in. Pretty much I agree with Nate above though I would make Bonds and Clemens at least sweat it out for a while.