A question of character
It’s time for the Hall of Fame to take a stand on PEDs, gambling, and personal flaws
My new book, Cooperstown at the Crossroads, offers a nine-point plan to reinvigorate the National Baseball Hall of Fame. (The book is now available from Niawanda Books.) I’m going into detail about each of my nine proposals on successive Fridays in this newsletter. Today — Point No. 8, character guidance.
Ozzie Smith was an ever-smiling embodiment of humility, always quick to applaud others, always slow to accept praise. Comtemporaries hailed him as the slickest shortstop in history — a fielder without peer — yet he expressed doubts. “People who get to see me all the time may say I’m the best, but I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never even had a chance to see some great shortstops like Mark Belanger or Luis Aparicio or Marty Marion.”
Few writers shared his reticence. They whisked Smith into the Hall of Fame on his first try in 2002, giving him an overwhelming level of support (91.7 percent). The induction thrilled him, though Smith remained true to his nature. He reminded fans that he and the other Hall of Famers were not perfect individuals, far from it.
“Of course, the people that have plaques in there, it’s all going to be about the good stuff,” Smith said. “But there’s some bad stuff, too, and that’s for all of us. I think we all have a dark side of our lives.”
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Several Hall of Famers, Smith not among them, have been shadowed by backgrounds of exceptional darkness. Let’s wade through Cooperstown’s checklist of character flaws, with induction dates in parentheses:
Babe Ruth (1936), the greatest ballplayer of all time, was often asked the secret of his success. “Good, clean living,” he always answered with a laugh. The Babe was notorious in the baseball world as a serial philanderer with a seemingly endless capacity for Prohibition-era liquor.
Several of Ruth’s Hall of Fame colleagues were flat-out alcoholics, notably Pete Alexander (1938), Paul Waner (1952), and Hack Wilson (1979). Reporters were baffled when Casey Stengel called Waner graceful, and they asked the manager why he felt the adjective was appropriate. “Because he could slide into second base without breaking the bottle in his hip pocket,” Stengel replied.
Addiction became the unofficial theme of Cooperstown’s 2004 ceremony. Both of that year’s inductees had battled substance-abuse problems in the early stages of their careers — Paul Molitor with cocaine, Dennis Eckersley with alcohol.
Wade Boggs (2005) blamed a different form of addiction after a long-standing extramarital affair was revealed. He suggested that his problem might have been an excessive desire for sex. “It’s not like I did drugs, or shot someone, or ended up in prison,” Boggs said.
Fergie Jenkins (1991) and Orlando Cepeda (1999) were both arrested on drug charges. Jenkins was detained at Toronto’s airport with four grams of cocaine in his luggage. “They weren’t mine. They were found in my bag,” he said vaguely after a judge granted him an absolute discharge. Cepeda served a 10-month prison sentence in Puerto Rico for smuggling marijuana.
Rube Waddell (1946) was briefly jailed in 1903 for failing to support his wife financially. He was suspended from the majors twice the same year, once for climbing into the stands to attack a spectator, the other time for skipping out on his team, the Philadelphia Athletics.
Duke Snider (1980) was sentenced to two years of probation and fined $5,000 for income tax evasion. “We’re in the world of choice, and I made the wrong choice,” he said.
Kirby Puckett (2001) and Roberto Alomar (2011) were both accused of domestic abuse. Puckett’s wife charged him with choking her with a cord and threatening her with a gun. A woman described as a “baseball industry employee” accused Alomar of sexual misconduct.
Cap Anson (1939) was a virulent racist who spearheaded the drive to segregate the National League in the 1880s. He was, in essence, the father of baseball’s color barrier. The N-word was so deeply ingrained in Anson’s vocabulary that he even used it in his autobiography.
Sportswriter Fred Lieb reported that Tris Speaker (1937) and Rogers Hornsby (1942) told him they were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Lieb also suspected Ty Cobb (1936) of being connected to the KKK: “His general attitude toward black fellow citizens and his unreasoning dislike for the Church of Rome and its hierarchy clearly made him eligible for Klan membership.”
Speaker and Cobb were accused of conspiring to fix a game in September 1919. The case eventually landed on the desk of the commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who cleared them both. But historian Lowell Blaisdell came to a different conclusion after digging through the records in 2005. “Unless all the indicators, the clues, and the hints are misleading,” he wrote, “Cobb and Speaker, though exonerated, were probably guilty.”
The irascible Hornsby showed no respect for the rulebook. “You’ve got to cheat,” he wrote in 1961. “I know if I had played strictly by the rules, I’d have been home feeding my bird dogs a long time ago instead of earning a good living in baseball.” Hornsby was an inveterate gambler, eventually running up such huge debts at the racetrack that his farm was forced into foreclosure.
Gaylord Perry (1991) was far from alone in his reliance on the spitball — a pitch that had been banned in 1920 — though he was unusually proud of the connection. He titled his autobiography Me and the Spitter. “I reckon I tried everything on the old apple, but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce topping,” he admitted.
These sins vary in intensity. Some are clearly reprehensible; others might be considered forgivable. The degree of tolerance depends on the beholder, and most voters have proven to be very tolerant indeed. That’s why every single player listed above remains a member in good standing of the Hall of Fame, no matter the severity of his transgressions.
The hall has issued only a couple of pronouncements on character-related issues. The first was its 1944 adoption of Rule 5, which vaguely implored voters to consider each candidate’s “integrity, sportsmanship, [and] character,” among other factors. The second was its 1991 edict barring Pete Rose from membership.
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Wayward behavior has surfaced as a minor issue in several elections, including the very first. The failure of two frontrunners to receive unanimous support in 1936 was widely attributed to their personal flaws. “Ruth and Cobb may have failed in the character test,” as sportswriter John Kieran put it. But the C-word never became a significant factor during the hall’s first 55 years. Rule 5 never prevented an otherwise worthy contender from entering the plaque gallery.
Pete Rose presented a special case. Rose gambled on the Cincinnati Reds while serving as their manager, a direct violation of major-league rules. He was slapped with a lifetime suspension in August 1989, two and a half years before he was scheduled to appear on the Hall of Fame ballot. The hall’s board subsequently acted to prevent Rose’s debut, voting in February 1991 to bar him (and any other permanently ineligible player) from consideration.
Cooperstown slipped back into peaceful repose for 20 years or so. It didn’t confront another character issue of truly serious dimensions until 2013, when alleged steroid abusers Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens made their way to the ballot. The debate over performance-enhancing drugs has continued at a fevered pitch ever since.
The hall, which acted so swiftly in Rose’s case, offered no help at all to voters ensnared in the PED controversy. I’ve already cited a 2022 New York Times interview with Josh Rawitch, the hall’s president, but his quote bears repeating. “Once you try to start giving guidance on character in one instance, you probably have to start giving it in all instances,” he said. “We just think it’s far more important to leave that up to the electorate, whether that’s the BBWAA or the Era Committees, because it means something different to every person.”
That’s called passing the buck.
Character has become too big an issue to be handled in such a cavalier manner. The time has come for the Hall of Fame’s leaders to cut through the confusion and demonstrate leadership. These are the necessary steps:
Pete Rose’s hall eligibility will be restored.
Selection Committee members will be instructed to assess a candidate’s on-field accomplishments, but not his character, when voting for the Hall of Fame.
Those same committee members will be allowed to take character into account, if they wish, when voting for the Elite 100.
Rose’s ineligibility, to be blunt, is absolutely senseless. Yes, he violated a rule and, yes, he should have been suspended for a time. But an eternal ban is ridiculous, especially in light of baseball’s current eagerness to cozy up to online gambling services.
The National Football League faced an identical problem in 1963, when investigators discovered that star players Paul Hornung and Alex Karras were regularly betting on NFL games. Commissioner Pete Rozelle suspended them indefinitely, a ban he lifted 11 months later. “This is a move that can be applauded with the same fervor as his original action,” New York Times columnist Arthur Daley wrote of the reinstatement. “The commissioner proved his point and hammered home a stunning object lesson. There was no need for its continuance.”
Anybody who ever threw a game — like Shoeless Joe Jackson (quality score of 44 points) or Eddie Cicotte (36 points) — deserves to be permanently banned from baseball’s Hall of Fame. But Pete Rose was totally unlike the notorious Black Sox. He always bet on his own team, and he always tried to win. He belongs in Cooperstown. Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, after all, were both enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The world did not stop spinning.
The issue of performance-enhancing drugs is trickier.
Ballplayers and other athletes have always been intrigued by the mysteries of chemistry. Pud Galvin, who pitched between 1875 and 1892, reportedly consumed an elixir made from monkey testicles. Babe Ruth allegedly injected himself on at least one occasion with an extract from sheep testicles. It’s unknown if either of these Hall of Famers received the testosterone boost he was hoping for.
Drugs of greater effectiveness made their way into baseball clubhouses after World War II, as documented by a pair of players-turned-authors. Jim Brosnan joked in his 1960 bestseller, The Long Season, about the importance of “nine-inning pills” for starting pitchers. Jim Bouton dealt with the subject of amphetamines more directly in 1970’s Ball Four, using their popular nickname at the time: “Greenies are pep pills — dextroamphetamine sulfate — and a lot of baseball players couldn’t function without them.”
Stronger PEDs reportedly hit baseball in the 1970s, though athletes in other sports had been experimenting with them since the middle of the 20th century. Russian weightlifters reportedly began taking anabolic steroids around 1954. The first documented doping case in the Olympics occurred in 1960, when a Danish cyclist died after being injected with roniacol. “Danish sports have been dragged down into the mud by criminal cheaters in cycling,” wailed a Copenhagen newspaper.
Olympic officials were slow to recognize the danger, and the same was true of their baseball counterparts. Steroid abuse in the major leagues was an open secret by the 1990s. “All you all knew,” Tony Gwynn said to reporters in 2007. “We knew. Players knew. Owners knew. Everybody knew. And we didn’t say anything about it.”
Mark McGwire, who set a new record with 70 home runs in 1998, lied and equivocated for 12 years before admitting PED use. “It’s something I’m certainly not proud of,” he said in 2010. “I’m certainly sorry for having done it.”
Other high-profile suspects, notably Bonds and Clemens, adamantly denied all accusations. They were never suspended, and their criminal records were clean. (Bonds’s 2011 conviction on a charge of obstruction of justice was overturned in 2015.)
It’s tempting to shut Cooperstown’s doors to any candidate who ever used PEDs, or was overwhelmingly suspected of having done so. “The game of baseball has no place for cheaters,” said Henry Aaron. “There’s no place in the Hall of Fame for people who cheat.” But avowed cheater Rogers Hornsby is already in the plaque gallery, and so are several players who experimented with earlier forms of chemical assistance. Who knows how much their careers were helped — if at all — by testicular elixirs or amphetamines?
It’s similarly impossible to know who really used steroids — absent a confession — or what benefits the users might have received. Voters tacitly acknowledged this point when they began inducting players who had been the subjects of unconfirmed PED rumors, including Mike Piazza (2016), Jeff Bagwell (2017), Ivan Rodriguez (2017), and David Ortiz (2022).
The Hall of Fame’s mission statement lays out three aims: “preserve the sport’s history, honor excellence within the game, and make a connection between the generations of people who enjoy baseball.” It says nothing about protecting the purity of the sport, which is why so many miscreants reside comfortably within its gallery.
Members of the Selection Committee should not attempt to be private investigators, pharmaceutical analysts, or public ethicists — three jobs they are totally unqualified to fill. They should confine themselves to the hall’s mission of honoring excellence. They should base their assessments of candidates on what is reliably known about those players — namely, their records. Former commissioner Fay Vincent, who was decidedly old school on many issues, stands with the newer generation on this one. “Bonds and Clemens may not have been saints, but they were great players,” he said. “Pretending anything else is hypocrisy.”
So yes, all of baseball’s outstanding players should be enshrined in the Hall of Fame. But it’s important to remember that a higher honor, the Elite 100, has been added to the structure. The hall’s ethical standards have varied widely — extremely loose for decades, rather tight these days — resulting in the strange gaps that currently plague its membership. The Elite 100 must avoid such inconsistency.
Selection Committee members will be given a choice. They will be permitted to take character into account when electing players to the elite chamber, or they will be allowed to ignore the C-word as a factor. The Elite 100 will be baseball’s highest honor, so it seems reasonable to give greater latitude to the voters who are responsible for choosing the winners. But committee members must pledge to conduct their character analysis in a uniform manner. If they opt to bar PED users, they should also be willing to vote against racists, domestic abusers, cheaters, and other malefactors.
It will be interesting to see what choices they make.