Make Joe Posnanski A One-Man Hall Of Fame Selection Committee

As he said on Monday, his column tomorrow will talk about the guys who were right on the cusp.

That’s quite good. Seems like a Hall-of-Famer to me.

That none of the current HOFers used PEDs?

I think Pete Rose should be in too.

I could’ve sworn McGwire said he started using drugs in 1994 after he had been dealing with injuries. And McGwire was a far superior hitter than Dave Kingman ever was. I personally don’t penalize anyone who used drugs in MLB before rules were put into effect.

But this is what you see when you get to the bottom line:
McGwire: .263/.394/.588 162! OPS+
Kingman: .236/.302/.478 115 OPS+

What happened during the offseason between 1986 and 1987 in Oakland that allowed McGwire, in his rookie season, to have a better season in terms of BA, OBP, SLG, HRs, walks, and just about everything than Kingman ever had?

I understand the opinion of people in your camp, the only problem is the we don’t know who cheated. We don’t even know when it started. Bodybuilders started using anabolic steroids in the 60s, so is our rough estimate of the steroid era in baseball 1970-2000? 1980? 1990? Do we know? Will we ever know? How many pitchers used steroids, something that people rarely consider? What happens if pitcher A faced more beefed-up players than pitcher B? Is that fair?

All I know is that a “lot” of players used steroids in the 90s. That’s what I’m told. We don’t know exactly who, what, or how much. All I do know is that McGwire comes out as the second best offensive player of that generation, and somewhere within the top 25 of all time. To keep him from being recognized as such because we “know” he (and a lot of his peers) did something to make themselves better that broke no rules doesn’t make sense.

To go back to your original point that steroids are the only difference between McGwire and Kingman, are they really? If steroids make the difference in 30+ points of BA, over 90 points of OBP, and over 100 of slugging percentage, wouldn’t we have a lot more players with the insane stats of McGwire? I think they made him better, but not any more than they helped everyone else. Like I said, he still comes out as the 2nd best offensive player of that generation.

And Bagwell, well you don’t really know. I kind of want to believe he didn’t, but you just don’t know.

That’s the point, you don’t know.

Just like you don’t know about David Wright, Ryan Howard, Jose Bautista, Miguel Cabrera, etc.
…ok, there’s testing now, but there are loopholes and cheating on the tests themselves.

Even more important, from the Pos Piece itself:

Jeff Bagwell — though he never tested positive for steroids, never was implicated in any public way, was not named in the Mitchell Report or by anyone on the record as a suspected user, and is not even on this rather comprehensive list of players linked to steroids or HGH — seems to have become in some voters’ minds a player who used performance-enhancing drugs.