Yes yes, David Ortiz made it into the Hall this year.
But Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were not admitted in their final year of eligibility for admission by the voters. Almost certainly because many of the voters believe they used steroids.
It doesn’t really matter to me whether they used steroids, or if they were entitled jerks. They’re scapegoats. As far as I’m concerned, the Hall of Fame is meaningless as long as Bonds and Clemens aren’t in it.
I believe that Major League Baseball willfully turned a blind eye to players using performance-enhancing drugs for decades, dating back to amphetamine use in the 1940s. The owners reaped the rewards of players like Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, Palmeiro and others breaking records in the 1990s and 2000s. The buck stops with the owners and their businesses, who fostered and facilitated this environment.
Baseball and the owners should admit and publicly apologize for their culpability in the PED scandal. They should grant amnesty to every player suspected of using PEDs through (at least) 2005, and by fiat put any player with even a borderline case for election into the Hall. That’s the very least they should do, given the huge benefits they reaped.
Barring that, every player in the Hall who played between 1946 and 2005 should be removed from the Hall.
Are the players culpable? I don’t care. The owners’ shadow games have muddied the waters too much for us to know what happened, and in any event the owners share whatever blame the players deserve due to their (at least) negligence.
Until then, I say that the Hall of Fame is a joke. A clown show.