Joe Morgan Has Horrible Thoughts on HOF Voting
- I try to keep things to Chicago around these parts, but every once in a while I do like to speak to happenings around the league. The BBWAA recently released the ballot for this year’s Hall of Fame voting. Like most years, and more so over this ten-year span, there are a lot of debates on who should or shouldn’t be voted in.
2018 National Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot
There are a lot of names that are a shoe in for the HOF, maybe they get in on their first ballot, maybe it takes a couple of years. Guys like Chipper Jones, Gary Sheffield, and Vladimir Guerrero. But then there are the other guys… The guys that sit atop of the record books but the cloud of performance-enhancing drugs loom over their careers. The Barry Bonds, the Roger Clemens, the Sammy Sosa‘s of the world.
PED’s and baseball fans have had a very volatile relationship. While it is crystal clear, steroids saved the game of baseball after the players strike in 1994. A lot of fans have a holier-than-all attitude when it comes to those very same players that brought them back to the game. It’s like an old episode of Grey’s Anatomy… there was an old racist dude that had to have emergency brain surgery, enter Dr. Preston Burke, a black brain surgeon to save the day. Dr. Burke saves the man’s life, but the man awakes to still be a racist.
I don’t think we should completely excuse steroid use in professional sports, not for a second, but I also don’t know how we can continue to be ignorant of the history of baseball.
But of course, that is where Joe Morgan comes in…
Joe Morgan’s Statement
Look, I do not like Joe, and I will openly say it has a lot to do with his criticism of Chicago Cubs great, Ryne Sandberg. Ryno had some limitations, but he was the best second baseman in the game from 1982 to 1993. One of the first questions we ask when we do HOF voting is – was he the best at his position for a decade. Ryno checked that box.
But Ryno isn’t the only player to fall victim to Joe’s wrath. It seems anytime there was a player which could knock him down a peg on the HOF totem pole, or when there was a questionable decision – his voice was the loudest in opposition. While the HOF should remain sacred, it almost seems like Joe would be fine never allowing another player into the hallowed halls.
Joe is at it again, and players that have ties to PED’s appear to be in his crosshairs. Joe, who is somehow the vice chairman of the hall, sent a Letter pleading that they do not vote players that had ties to PED’s into the Hall of Fame.
I’m sure there are a lot of baseball fans that agree with Joe’s letter. It just forgets the fact that – THERE ARE TONS OF CHEATERS IN THE HALL OF FAME.
Joe, and apparently a “group of HOF players,” would like to keep the cheaters of the 90’s and early 2000’s out. They seem to ignore the horrible people that already are enshrined next to them. There are racists and cheats. Brawlers, drug users, and at least one acknowledged sex addict in the hall – and that’s just Ty Cobb (da dum tis).
The NY Times made a huge account of the bad dudes in the game a few years ago. In it they talked about how Cobb and Tris Speaker were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Cap Anson established the color line in the game in the 1880’s. Charles Comiskey outed an African American posing as a Native American. There are countless drunks, who more than often played completely blitzed. Gaylord Perry cheated every time he took the mound by doctoring baseballs with tar, spit, sandpaper, or whatever else he could use. Orlando Cepeda was arrested for smuggling marijuana. Guys cheated on wives, taxes, and games.
But if this wasn’t enough to prove there are questionable people already in the Hall, perhaps this will.
Amphetamines in the game
There are already tons of players in the Hall of Fame who used performance-enhancing drugs. Beginning just after World War II, amphetamines, or greenies or speed, ran rampant in baseball clubhouses. The drug was so openly used, there were often bowls of them in the clubhouse next to coffee pots. This drug is very commonly overlooked, and it is because fans don’t understand what greenies did but they know what steroids do.
So let’s understand what an amphetamine is, and how it came into the game.
When players left to fight in World War II they were exposed to the drug. Both Allied and Axis forces took amphetamines for their stimulant and performance-enhancing capabilities. Allied forces would give speed to their pilots to keep from fatigue on long flights. In fact, during the Persian-Gulf War, it was estimated that half the U.S. Air Force pilots were using amphetamines. The usage was so widely used that Germany had gone through 35-million three-milligram doses in WWII and more than one billion pills were produced between 1939 and 1945. When the player’s returned home, to the game, they brought this miracle drug back with them.
But what exactly are the effects of the drug? How did it enhance player’s performance?
The biggest effects of greenies were the effects on stimulation and alertness. Popping one of these would help someone remain more alert under the most fatiguing situations. This is a huge reason our military, as well as a lot of industries that relied upon hours upon hours of physical labor, relied upon the drug. The users could go on and on and on without fatigue, and still, have perfect mental awareness. When you are marching a division along tough foreign terrain throughout the night, this was a miracle drug with apparently little to no side-effects (as far as they knew).
These would also increase their synaptic speed, or ability to react. Basically allowing a soldier the ability to react faster when under stress. Seeing an attack from a certain angle and having the ability to maneuver quickly. Along with a heightened reaction time, user’s pupils would be widened, allowing them to see and process more information, and with that reaction time being increased, allowing them to more quickly react to that information.
Players felt the incredible amount of energy they now had. When there were doubleheaders, or a long stretch of games in the intense heat, or a game went long into extra innings and there was travel with a game that next day – players were no longer tired. They popped a greenie, sometimes just in their coffee, and they were good to go.
The wear and tear of 154 or 162 were no longer there. A player was just as strong on day one of a season as they were in game 162. Days off for stars happened less often. The lingering aches and pains didn’t factor in any longer. The ability to see and process information faster, allowed them to see a ball, see the spin, process the speed, and give them a higher ability to hit that ball. Since they were physically stronger, they were able to hit that ball harder as well.
A lot of fans don’t comprehend just how hard it is to remain mentally aware of everything in the way that a Major League baseball player needs to be aware. I would be willing to bet that most fans have never had the need to remain at peak mental performance for a three-hour stretch, in their lives. Pro players do this for three-hour stretches for six months of the year.
These pills gave these players that ability. They gave them the ability to play for three hours, shower, come back the next day and play just as hard for three hours, then the next day and the next day and the next day…. for six months, they would come back just as strong, just as alert, just as good as they did the day before. This was unprecedented in the game before this point. This is how Hank Aaron became the home run champ, and no one wanted an asterisk next to his name before cheating.
1990’s Performance-Enhancing Drugs
The 90’s added a new twist. With ballplayers receiving huge contracts and endorsements, along with it came the pressure to succeed. No longer were players able to change their lives forever, they were earning the type of money to change the next two generation’s lives forever.
Jose Canseco, who was blackballed from the game for talking about the ugly underbelly of doping, wrote Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, which exposed players like Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez and Jason Giambi, as steroid users. This further infuriated the game, players, and fans alike – but he was the first whistleblower on the epidemic in baseball. Soon after the game began to reform.
Testing, congressional hearings, BALCO, finger-wagging were keywords that began to take over the sport. Anyone who did anything special in the game was immediately pointed to as a potential user. McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who literally saved the game after the baseball strike, were now public enemy number 1A and 1B. Barry Bonds, who was named the player of the decade in the 90’s, was pushed out after a season in which he had 26 HR and a .276/.480/.565 slash line. Punishments became stricter and stricter. Supposedly clean players came out strongly against dopers, and even some (alleged) dopers spoke out against the drugs.
Records were falling at an insane pace. A lot of those records were directly tied to steroids, PEDs, and other forms of doping. But it wasn’t just hitters, pitchers were being named in these studies as well. Quickly we learned the value that rebuilt the game, what we believed in, had all been a lie.
Or was it…
Players implicated
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens. Let’s stop at those two right there for a moment.
Bonds had hit a record 73 HR in 2001 and finished with the most home runs ever, 762. He ranks in the top six in RBI (5th), Walks (1st), total bases (4th), runs scored (3rd), OPS (4th), slugging % (5th), WAR (2nd), OBP (6th), runs created (1st), extra-base hits (2nd), times on base (2nd). Oh, and he only won a measly seven MVP awards.
Roger Clemens was a freak on the mound. After his career started out with so much promise as a Boston Red Sox, he took his talents to Toronto and played for the Blue Jays. In his two seasons north of the border he amassed 41 wins and had a combined 2.33 ERA. This seemed to revitalize a career that was slipping away.
In the next nine seasons, Clemens would win 121 more games for the New York Yankees and Houston Astros. Pitching well, he continued to play until he was 44 years old. At that time he retired with seven career Cy Young Awards, led the league in ERA seven times, won 354 games, finished 3rd all-time in pitcher WAR, and has the 3rd most strikeouts ever.
The fact that players like Barry and Roger aren’t represented in the Hall is a travesty.
Now yes, we can say that they are directly responsible for that travesty. Similar to Pete Rose, these guys aren’t deserving to be in that Hall due to their “crimes” against the sport.
But how different are steroids than greenies?
Steroids vs Amphetamines
So the debate comes down to which was worse – steroids or amphetamines?
A lot of fans will immediately point to steroids, they obviously allowed hitters to hit balls further. The home run outburst of the 90’s and 2000’s was absurd and directly tied to the usage of PEDs during those eras.
It is hard to argue with that if that is all you are looking at.
Making that statement is a shortsighted look on steroids and the impact they had or didn’t have on the game of baseball. Which yes, the result of this era was a lot of home runs, I think that completely discounts all other factors that were circling around baseball during this time.
Baseball players not only were bigger because of performance-enhancing drugs, but they were bigger because they were working out more. Remember, baseball became a legitimate business in the 1980’s. When Nolan Ryan signed the first $1 million contract in 1980, baseball changed.
Fewer and fewer guys went into an offseason and just boozed it up, or needed to have winter jobs. The incredibly intense offseason baseball program was born. The business of baseball changed the way guys handled themselves. But this wasn’t limited to just professional athletes, this was cycled down through minor leagues, colleges, and high school baseball programs. In fact, there are kids out there as you are reading this that are 10 years old going through an intense training program.
Players got bigger naturally, then added steroids on top of it. But did steroids really help?
Evidence of a steroid impact
The first argument, steroids don’t improve someone’s ability to hit a ball. With both pitchers and hitters presumably on PEDs, the best of the best were still standing out above the rest. Former Minnesota Twins center fielder, Shannon Stewart had something fairly surprising to say about just this.
The truth is, there were so many guys taking steroids for a few years, and they couldn’t hit like Barry Bonds. In my opinion, a guy hitting with a corked bat is taking a bigger advantage than someone who was on steroids,” Stewart said. “If Bonds was doing all of this … you still have to hit the ball. He still was going to hit 40 or 50 (each season), with or without steroids.
Sure this is a dismissive argument on the subject, and it doesn’t answer whether or not PEDs can help someone hit a ball further. But that is where Chris O’Leary comes in.
I have leaned on Chris in the past, mostly when talking about pitching mechanics. His take isn’t as much as “you still have to hit the ball” as it is, “these guys possess otherworldly mechanics” that allow them to hit the ball, hard. He argues that it is much more plausible that their mechanics are what allows them to hit the ball a long way. This is hard to argue against… When you look at Barry Bonds, his mechanics were impeccable.
ESPN’s Patrick Hruby brought together a team of people to figure out what the potential impact of PEDs was on Barry Bonds from 1999 through ’07. He asked a swing guru, a major league scout, training and biomechanics specialists, an expert on the physics of baseball, and a nuclear scientist to help. There was a test on how much muscle mass he added, what impact that extra muscle had on a swing, how much faster a ball would come off a bat that was swung a measured 1.48 MPH faster.
The results were pretty astounding.
They showed that Bonds’ additional muscle added a maximum of 9 feet to a properly struck ball at the proper exit angles. That study saw that there were around 66 home runs that fell into that grey space of 9 feet from the wall. The team was also able to account for the added stamina steroids gave Bonds throughout the season, eliminating another 33 homers over that span. This would have given him a final career total of 663, or a no question Hall of Fame career.
Such is the shame in having to wonder: Without steroids, Bonds was a damn good player. With steroids, he’s a good player damned, Hruby wrote.
What was incredible about that story was, Jack Mankin, a swing fanatic, studied Bonds swing from 1988 all the way through until the end of his career. He would chart and graph his swing, where his hands were at points, when he began rotations, etc. It remained unchanged from his rookie season until the day he retired. UNCHANGED. The only thing that did change was his swing speed, by 1.48 MPH. That mile and a half added that 9 feet to a properly struck baseball. Whether that increase in speed was a direct result of steroids or not, may not ever be able to be proven.
Greenie factor
With greenies, they helped a player that was certainly great, become even greater more often. It gave a player that would tire in the second game of a doubleheader, the ability to stay strong through all six or more hours of baseball. It allowed good hitters a real possibility of hitting for higher averages. It allowed someone who was prone to missing curveballs the ability to recognize them sooner. It allowed someone to have greater reaction time on groundballs. It helped catchers react better to balls in the dirt. It allowed a hitter to hit a ball in the sweet spot as opposed to just missing it.
People make the argument that steroids can’t make you hit a ball, but it is actually true with greenies. By widening the pupils, by creating faster reaction times – they helped players hit the ball.
Similar to steroids, speed helped hitters remain in peak form late in the season. If we can eliminate 33 home runs from Bonds’ HR total over the course of seven seasons (an average of 4.7 home runs a year), couldn’t we do that to all players that have played in the greenie era? I mean it isn’t an exact science, but there are many studies that PEDs and greenies had very similar effects on durability and stamina. So what if we removed 4.7 home runs a season from Hank Aaron, an admitted amphetamine user? That would remove 108 home runs, leaving him with a total of 647.
You are probably saying that is preposterous. We can’t take away from Hank! Well, why is it ok to take it away from Barry then?
Other factors in the game
We have only covered steroids and amphetamines to this point. We have yet to tackle some of the other oddities that were happening in the game. The first thing we need to address is the baseball.
The baseball from the strike years until today has been a harder ball (it has changed off and on throughout the seasons). Since it was harder, when struck right, it flies further. Now we add stronger players, who may or may not have been on steroids, and a ball that is wound tighter – of course, it will go further when hit.
We were also building new ballparks that have shorter fences. Take a look at old Busch Memorial Stadium. When it was originally built in 1966 it was 330′ down the left and right field lines, 386′ to the power allies, and 414′ to centerfield. The current Busch Stadium is 336′ to left (335′ to right) but 375′ to each power ally and 400′ to center. We also have stadiums that continue to move in their fences, with Citi Field moving in their fences twice, PetCo following suit, Safeco joining them, and then finally Marlins Park jumping in the group.
Baseball has more bandboxes in Coors Field, Chase Field, Miller Park, Rogers Centre, Globe Life Park, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Great American Ball Park, US Cellular Field, Minute Maid Park, Progressive Field, Citizens Bank Park, and the new Yankee Stadium. Each of those parks have been somewhat recently built and give up more than a home run a game.
There was the expansion in the game. Since the 1992 season, MLB added four teams to the mix. But that wasn’t all, these teams added 100 new MLB jobs, roughly half of them being pitchers. When things like this happen, it waters down talent pools. It allows truly great players to feast on otherwise poor pitching.
There were more “swing scientists,” as I like to call them. These were the first guys in on really understanding the physics around lift and how that increased a hitter’s likelihood of hitting a ball further. Or the idea of a 33% chance on each swing to get a hit, causing less hitters to cut down with two-strikes. Then add pitchers being less likely to pitch in on hitters, and hitting batters became an obsolete tool.
All of these things factor into an increase home runs. I don’t know if you can put a number on which was more significant to the increase in production. Was it PEDs or ballpark, baseballs, expansion, swings, pitching location that caused the increase in homers? You would have to think they all played into it.
I think it was a perfect storm of events. Better athletes, smaller parks, tighter wound baseballs, thinned out talent, better training, and yes steroids. I really believe that if two of these other factors weren’t involved, the impact wouldn’t have appeared as severe.
Joe Morgan is wrong
Performance-enhancing drugs have been running rampant in baseball since the 1940’s. Players that Joe Morgan played with (perhaps even he) used speed, greenies, or red juice. Maybe they drank the “leaded” coffee in the clubhouse, or maybe they just grabbed something from the bowl not realizing what they were really doing. In any case, his era was more likely more “enhanced” than any era of baseball, ever.
The only evidence that steroids allow someone to hit a ball further, shows in the best case (player) ever, it added a mere nine feet to a perfectly struck ball. While you “might” be able to add nine feet to a fly ball with steroids – greenies had shown the ability to actually allow players to hit the ball. But there were many other factors which very likely added to the illusion that steroids caused more home runs in baseball. But we are walking down a slippery slope when we say either performance-enhancer, steroids or amphetamines, had a smaller impact on the game.
It’s equally infuriating that in 2017, we are still needing to have these conversations. Sure you want a “clean” game, but, You.Have.Never.Had.A.Clean.Game.
Presented without commentary. pic.twitter.com/POVpAjn0Ti
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) November 21, 2017
The Joe Morgan letter just further contributes to the sepia-toned reification of baseball history, treating previous eras as halcyon days of good sportsmanship and fair play, when the truth is that it has always been played by normal humans who’d often do anything to win.
— keithlaw (@keithlaw) November 21, 2017
Baseball’s Hall of Fame honors great baseball players — not ballplayers who were perfect human beings. There are no ‘hallowed grounds.’ Start with this: The guy believed to have written the HOF’s so-called ‘character clause’ was a segregationist.
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) November 21, 2017
Gotta be REALLLLLY CAREFUL in jumping on the “No steroid user should be in the baseball HOF!” Why? Because there’s a little thing known as greenies that a very large number of players openly admit to having consumed in handfuls in order to play thru fatigue BEFORE the steroid era
— Len Kasper (@LenKasper) November 21, 2017
If you support Hank Aaron or Willie Mays in the Hall of Fame, but don’t support Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens – you are just wrong.
totally agree with joe morgan ; he should have written the letter last year before they let piazza in