After Alex Rodriguez admitted to taking banned performance enhancing substances for at least three years in his very successful career, the question on everyone’s mind seems to be whether A-Rod should be admitted into baseball’s Hall of Fame?
I think it’s probably safe to assume the decision to induct “tainted” players will be well decided before Alex retires from the game. I don’t think he is going to be the measuring stick for Cooperstown because he still has another 10-15 years left before he would even be eligible if he plays out his current contract. That could probably work out in his favor because if he finishes the rest of his career “clean” it could certainly go a long way to cleaning up the mess he tried to hide for far too long.
I think that’s an advantage that he has on the likes of Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa that he still has a significant chunk of his career ahead of him and allow people to forget or possibly move on. I think it’s quite naive to assume people will easily move on but I think they are more likely to forgive if the athlete seems sincere and are willing to change their ways.
Another aspect to the hall of fame inductions is what happens if a player who slips through without ever being suspected of doping is outed afterwards as a steroids user? Surely you can’t revoke his induction but once you allow one player who has supposedly shamed the game, you have to allow them all.
It is a complicated issue that is not going away anytime soon because the scientists will always be several steps ahead of any test that the league and union agrees to but that is no way to go about running a league. Someone needs to come up with a sensible solution and someone needs to do it rather quickly.
With his press conference with the media scheduled for this week, one has to wonder how the greater player to play the game will be perceived? Andy Pettitte got off relatively easy after he came out and “honestly” answered everything the media threw at him. People were a little less but still forgiving nonetheless on Jason Giambi who apologized but wouldn’t say what he was apologizing for.
I think the start of Alex’s apology in an interview with ESPN was a great start but the moment he started to attack the reporter who broke the story is when he started to sound bitter and hurt any chance he had of looking sincere in his apology. He gets one and only one mulligan with this massive press conference the Yankees’ are holding for him at the start of spring training. If he completely tanks this one, the hole he digs will only get deeper from here, while on the other hand if he nails the grilling session he can make himself look a little bit more “respectable”.
(I guess this wasn’t bad for a full length post that was written through mobile means).
