The Baseball Hall of Fame is meant to enshrine only the greatest players of all time.
But it doesn't always work out that way.
From racism to cheating to steroids, here are the Baseball Hall of Fame's biggest controversies
ever.
What's become known as baseball's "performance-enhancing drug era," which lasted roughly from the late
1980s until the early 2000s, is a scandal that continues to reverberate throughout the
sport.
No one knows exactly how many players were guilty at the time of taking drugs to gain
an edge.
But it was undoubtedly a lot of them, and the inflated statistics of the era are clear
evidence that wholesale cheating was happening.
This has now infected the Hall of Fame as players widely suspected of using performance-enhancing
drugs become eligible.
The writers who vote on inductees aren't beholden to any clear rules or guidelines.
So they can, and do, leave players off their ballots for personal reasons, and many of
them resent players whom they suspect of drug use.
For example, Mike Piazza, one of the most dominant catchers of his time, was widely
suspected of steroid use.
That almost certainly explains the fact that he failed to get the required 75 percent of
the vote the first three years he was eligible.
Other notable suspected drug users who remain on the outside looking in include Barry Bonds,
who holds both the single-season and all-time home run records, and pitcher Roger Clemens,
who won seven Cy Young Awards.
The role of Commissioner of Baseball isn't what it used to be.
First created in the wake of the Black Sox cheating scandal of 1919, the office was intended
to rebuild confidence in the game and save the major leagues from the inter-team squabbling
that threatened to tear it apart.
In the modern day, the commissioner is much less independent than originally conceived,
but the position is still plenty influential, which is plenty clear in the case of Bud Selig.
Selig, who served from 1992 until 2015, was in charge during the disastrous 1994 strike
that saw baseball's popularity nosedive.
He also oversaw the exciting home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998,
which is credited with re-sparking fans' love of the game and rehabilitating its image.
The problem is that McGwire and Sosa were among the many players at the time who were
almost certainly using performance-enhancing drugs, and Selig didn't take the problem seriously
until years later.
He didn't institute a strong drug screening policy until 2005, which means he basically
allowed cheating to flourish.
That's probably because it was good for business...until it wasn't.
Despite all this, though, Selig was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017.
The 2020 Hall of Fame class consisted of Derek Jeter, who was voted in nearly unanimously,
and Larry Walker.
The latter was a good player who earned three batting titles over the course of his career.
The problem is that while his statistics are impressive, they're a little on the weak side
by Hall of Fame standards.
Furthermore, he got a boost from playing most of his home games in Coors Field, a stadium
that's notorious for boosting hitting numbers thanks to its high altitude.
"I don't think any of us had stepped into a ballpark quite like that before."
Prior to joining the Colorado Rockies, Walker's career batting average was .282, a perfectly
respectable number but nothing compared to the .334 he hit as a Rockie.
While there are other ways of judging a player's impact, it's pretty clear that Walker benefited
from a serious home field advantage.
And sure, he didn't play poorly in road games, just not as spectacularly as he did at Coors.
This is one reason it took Walker so long to get into the Hall.
2020, after all, was his final year of eligibility.
In 2014, he received just 10.2 percent of the votes, largely because of the Coors Field
stigma.
Fans continue to argue both sides of this issue, but until the Hall of Fame explains
how stats like Walker's magically go from not-good-enough to just-barely-good-enough,
it will suffer from a credibility problem.
Pete Rose has the most hits of any baseball player in Major League history, 4,256 of them,
to be exact.
He led the league in hits seven times, and he played like a man who loved baseball more
than anything.
But he's not in the Hall of Fame, because he bet on baseball games while he was playing
for and managing the Cincinnati Reds.
This earned him a permanent placement on baseball's Ineligible List, which in turn means he can't
make it into the Hall.
Rose's gambling is an unforgivable sin, but there are plenty of other players in the Hall
who've bet on baseball games, and there are other inductees who have done way worse.
While the need to punish Rose is understandable, it's been more than 30 years, and if moral
failings are supposed to disqualify players from the Hall of Fame, that standard should
be applied retroactively to everyone.
But if that were to happen, the Hall would be a very empty place.
If nothing else, though, Rose should be removed from the Ineligible List so that Hall of Fame
voters can decide for themselves whether or not he's deserving.
The Veterans Committee, also known as the Eras Committee, is charged with reviewing
the careers of players who failed to be elected to the Hall of Fame during their initial term
of eligibility.
Recent years have seen changes that have shifted the focus to more modern players, but the
idea is the same: give some deserving players a second chance.
However, there's one problem.
Prior to 2018, the Veterans Committee had never once enshrined an African-American who
played his entire career in the major leagues.
In other words, the black players that the Veterans Committee has enshrined all played
some of their time in the Negro Leagues.
Some of that is due to the fact that baseball was segregated until 1947.
But there have been plenty of deserving candidates whose careers began after that time.
There's Dick Allen, Vida Blue, and Maury Wills, just to name a few.
Recent changes to the committee structures have improved things, but even if players
like Blue and Wills are eventually recognized as the greats that they were, it might be
too late for them to enjoy the honor while they're still alive.
The Eras Committee is designed to reconsider players who failed to make the vote during
the initial years of eligibility after they've retired.
This makes sense for players who have borderline statistics or other reasons that they might've
been overlooked, but the committee too often elects players who obviously fall short.
This was highlighted in 2018 when Harold Baines and Lee Smith were elected by the Eras Committee.
While Smith arguably has the stats worthy of inclusion, as his 478 career saves rank
third all-time, Baines never got more than 6.1 percent of the votes during his initial
term of eligibility, and for good reason.
He was certainly a decent player, and his total of 2,866 career hits looks pretty impressive
at first glance.
But his main achievement as a player was longevity.
Despite frequent injuries and a lack of defensive skills, he played for 22 seasons.
"I never watched Harold Baines and said, 'He's a Hall of Famer.'"
As Jon Tayler of Sports Illustrated put it,
"There's nothing to Baines' Hall of Fame case beyond his prodigious hit total, and he got
there by piling up thousands of plate appearances as a plodding [designated hitter] who could
barely play the field."
Even Baines himself admitted to being, quote, "very shocked" when he was inducted.
In the 1950s, the New York Yankees were a force of nature.
From 1949 to 1958, they finished in first place every year, except for 1954, when they
finished second.
Pitcher Whitey Ford was a big reason for that success, as he racked up 236 career wins over
16 years with the Yanks, a career that got him into the Hall of Fame in 1974.
The problem is that Ford admitted several times that he cheated, and pretty blatantly,
too.
He would cut the ball with his ring, and sometimes, he would load it with mud that he purposefully
seeded around the pitcher's mound.
Or he'd use a special "gunk" he prepared ahead of time made of baby oil, turpentine, and
resin.
Regarding his performance in the 1963 World Series, he confessed,
"I used enough mud to build a dam."
In a 1987 interview with The New York Times, in fact, Ford even said that he approved of
pitchers cheating because the money was too good to pass up.
The end result is that a player who not only admits to cheating but even endorses it has
a plaque in the Hall.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a more revered figure in early baseball than Rogers Hornsby.
His stats are legendary.
He twice achieved the Triple Crown by leading the league in batting average, home runs,
and RBIs.
And he's the only player in baseball history to hit over .400 with 40 home runs in a single
season.
He later found even more success as a player-manager.
But Hornsby was never well-liked by his fellow players.
In fact, when he was fired as manager of the Chicago Cubs in 1932 and the team went on
to the World Series without him, the players voted to deny him a share of their bonus out
of spite.
He was frequently fired and traded simply because he got along with precisely nobody.
But worst of all, there are persistent rumors that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Longtime sports reporter Fred Lieb maintained that Hornsby had admitted as much to him,
and Hornsby was also accused of releasing Catholic players from his teams because of
his prejudices.
The Black Sox scandal of 1919, which was dramatized in the 1988 film Eight Men Out, remains a
seminal moment in baseball's history.
Eight players on the Chicago White Sox were accused of taking bribes to throw the World
Series.
All eight were banned from baseball, despite never actually being convicted of the crimes.
Baseball then brought in a tough commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to oversee the game.
But there's one man who never suffered despite his obvious role in the scandal: White Sox
owner Charles Comiskey.
Comiskey was a criminally mean-spirited boss who underpaid his players and otherwise treated
them pretty badly.
He would humiliate them by making them launder their own uniforms, and he often cheated by
benching players in order to prevent them from getting contractual bonuses.
He was also a big fan of racial segregation in baseball.
But despite his treatment of his own players, the Black Sox scandal, and his obvious overall
negative influence on the game, he has a plaque in the Hall of Fame.
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