Performance Enhancement and Baseball's Hall Of Greats

More and more sports writers are coming around to the idea that the greats of baseball deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. They don't like it that "cheaters" will be there, but they also realize that many cheaters are ALREADY there.

The question which sums up what I've been preaching all along. "Why is a 2004 HGH user more of a cheater than a 1968 greenie user?" Some of fans greatest heroes played in an era of heavy PED use and they are still in the hall, most likely as users themselves. Greenie use was far more common in 1968 than steroid use was in 2004. It was as accepted as weight training is today. They shared the pills while in the dugout during games!

They've also come around to the idea that the 2004 era of baseball had LOTS of cheaters and that only a select few of them were great. In other words the drugs didn't MAKE them great, because if that were true, EVERYBODY would have been great in that era. They helped performance. They didn't make the performance.

Even sports writers are starting to admit that life isn't that easy to judge. Some of them have won major awards while using greenies themselves to stay awake until 4 in the morning to beat publication deadlines. They wrote great, award winning articles, while using pills to help them stay alert. They needed the "help."

MOST baseball writers have used those types of pills at one time or another.

Did Clemens and Bonds use PEDs knowingly? Even that point isn't clear. It's clear that they trusted their trainers, but that's all "the evidence" there is.

And baseball is still paying current acknowledged cheats like Melky Cabrera, Bartolo Colon, Jhonny Peralta, and Nelson Cruz a lot of money. There's a serious double standard at play.

We'll never know how much greenies helped contribute to the performance of Mays, Aaron, Maris. Mantle, Killebrew, Palmer, Yaz or... fill in a name. We'll just know that some of them cheated and they are in the hall anyway. Maybe MOST of them cheated and they are still in hall.

The current era is no different, accept that we caught a few of them.