House That Hank Built
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Is the Hall of Fame Already Tainted?

By Benjamin Chase

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Oct 30, 2015; New York City, NY, USA; New York Mets former catcher Mike Piazza waves to the crowd before throwing the ceremonial first pitch before game three of the World Series against the Kansas City Royals at Citi Field. Mandatory Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports
Oct 30, 2015; New York City, NY, USA; New York Mets former catcher Mike Piazza waves to the crowd before throwing the ceremonial first pitch before game three of the World Series against the Kansas City Royals at Citi Field. Mandatory Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports /

MLB Hall of Fame: The Overall Issue

Last week, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum welcomed Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza as its two newest members, as elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA, as it’s commonly known). With their election came the typical discussion that happens around every Hall of Fame induction announcement based around who should be in and who should not be in, and it leads to some solid baseball discussion during what is typically a lull time of transactions in the offseason coming out of the holiday season and New Year.

This year, as has been the case now for the better part of a decade, there is another element to that discussion – PEDs. Writers are left to attempt to decide who may have used, who didn’t use, whose numbers are “real”, and whose numbers are “enhanced”.

So what exactly is a PED? Well, the uninformed, simplistic view is that PED=steroid, but that’s not exactly true. A steroid is a performance enhancing drug, but a single oak tree is also part of a forest, and that’s where some of the discussion begins to get lost. Anabolic steroids were banned by major league baseball in 1991, however, due to reasons we’ll unpack more later in this discussion, there was no real testing nor punishment for any PED until 2005, allowing players nearly a 15-year window where they could really use without any repercussion, even though it was technically outlawed by the league.

Performance enhancing drugs really would be better termed as performance enhancing substances. Most view a “drug” as something taken into the body in either pill form or through an injection, but modern PEDs are introduced to the system in all sorts. That protein powder you stir into your smoothie in the morning? By definition, that’s a PED, as it’s a chemical compound intending to give you an increased amount of a certain substance (protein/testosterone/human growth hormone/etc.) than what you can get through typical diet and body response to exercise.

Next: A Long History

Writers have been “keeping out” many of the suspected PED users from the late 1990s and early 2000s when there was a large increase in offense in the game, largely attributed to PEDs. One of those players had been Mike Piazza, and now that he has been elected this season, it really piques the discussion going forward.

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