The Hall of Fame is not a Weapon

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I feel like I need to say it, like an elementary school principal:

"Boys and Girls: The Hall of Fame is not a Weapon. Put away your irrelevant opinions. Shut up about steroids. Stop judging EVERYONE. You're ruining this for the rest of us."

I've completely tuned out all of the Hall of Fame talk, to the point where I don't even want to read an article if I get a sniff of someone else's opinion about who's worthy of The Hall. Double that if they're talking about steroid use and how it impacted someone's performance. I don't even want to read the "objective" analysis that some really intelligent analysts have prepared, because at the end, it's just going to turn into some petty conversation about PEDs.

The Hall of Fame, to a lot of people, is sacred. I get that. It's one of the coolest places in the world to go, if you're really into baseball. The exhibits are fantastic, the atmosphere is great, and you can really lose yourself in it. There is no real substitute if you want to submerge yourself in baseball history for awhile. That's what makes people care about it, and because they care, they have strong opinions.

But what wrecks it for me is what Craig Calcaterra at Hardball Talk correctly referred to in his article today as a form of "Steroids McCarthyism". That's a great term, and it's exactly what turns me off: the constant suspicion. The arrogance of everyone, in the media or not, to assume that it's our job to weed out "the users" from "the straight guys" and make a value judgement in an absolute vacuum, devoid of real facts or evidence. That a player like Ken Griffey Jr is somehow above all of this (how could you possibly know that?), but maybe Jeff Bagwell isn't.

And what's even worse, we're arrogant enough to feel like we can judge someone who did use. Someone who was competing in a an ultra-competitive, mega-high-pressure  landscape; someone who was reared in a professional baseball culture that for a long time wasn't just turning a blind eye to their use, but was essentially encouraging that type of behavior, because of the interest and revenue it produced.

None of us, regardless of our resumes or our experience or our egos, should feel comfortable doing that. And we should feel downright ashamed of the way we wield Hall of Fame induction around like the Sword of Truth, knighting those men who are "worthy" and making pariahs of those who are not, simply because we're "suspicious".

It's starting to make me sick. I just want it to stop. I know it won't.