Frank Thomas Spoke Up About Jeff Bagwell And Pudge Rodriguez Getting Into The HOF As Speculated PED Users
It was only a matter of time until somebody spoke up, right? We all have egos, but pro athletes are on another level, and Hall of Famers are surely in another stratosphere.
Could you imagine playing at the major league level, 100% clean, for 20 years, attaining X-amount of numbers to earn a Hall of Fame induction, and then you see these dudes roiding up, and blowing past your numbers to achieve the same recognition and immortality in Cooperstown? As a Hall of Famer who played the game clean, I would be ripshit, and this is coming from someone who would also vote for alleged PED users. I understand that sounds hypocritical, and it kind of is, but it’s simply too much of a headache to play the witch hunt game with these guys, especially since we already knew that PED users had already gotten in.
I’m actually relieved to see that the Hall of Fame voters have shifted towards putting in speculated PED guys, and it’s only going to continue to shift in that direction, as thirteen of the fourteen new voters in 2017 both voted for Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. Knowing that it’s trending in that direction, I’m sure that we’re going to hear more and more current Hall of Famers voice their displeasure. To my knowledge, Frank Thomas was the first one to voice his opinion on the current Hall of Fame class in a negative tone.
“They should be in now, as far as I’m concerned,” Thomas said. “They’ve let a few people in already we all know. It’s uncomfortable at this point. I’m sure this year’s going to be uncomfortable because we’ve got two great players going in, but they know. It’s no secret. If they didn’t do it, they would be stomping and kicking and in interviews saying, ‘I didn’t do it.’”
“Not happy at all,” he said to a round of applause from fans. “Some of these guys were great players. But they wouldn’t have been great players without drugs. … I don’t mind these guys doing what they want to do for their families and make their money. But don’t come calling to the Hall of Fame and say ‘I’m supposed to be in the Hall of Fame’ when you know you cheated.”
“Trust me, there’s a lot of internal talk going on,” he said. “A lot of guys that I respect that are real, true Hall of Famers, all they have is their legacy. They didn’t make this kind of money. … They’re not happy about this at all.”
The point that Thomas made about the money is the one that I used to use as my logic to keep PED users out of the Hall of Fame. It makes sense. You cheated, you benefited from cheating in the form of gaining performance, fame, money, etc. But if you sold your soul to gain all of that, then you should not get the Hall of Fame as the icing on the cake. I thought that way for a long time. Trust me, it still bothers me to be on the other side of the fence of that argument now. I hate the idea of “rewarding” cheating. But it’s not so much rewarding cheating as it is just simply recognizing an era within the game’s history, and the best players who played within that era. That’s how I look at it.
It’s recognition. Because, look at it this way — yeah, the cheaters are getting the Hall of Fame, but are they really getting the Hall of Fame? They’ll get their plaque, and their speech, and they’ll get to inscribe autographs with “HOF” and their induction year, but will they ever truly feel like legitimate Hall of Famers? It doesn’t matter if they feel that way, because the fans won’t see them that way. The players know what they did. They know they don’t belong in the same category with the likes of the true Hall of Famers. But it’s a matter of simply being recognized, which is different from being honored, as one of the best players during the Steroid Era. It’s better to recognize them than to simply leave a blank page in an important chapter in baseball history.
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