Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattyk72
Show me a sport that hasn't been tainted by performance enhancing drugs at some point. Yet for some reason the purists act like baseball is supposed to be so above this.
I was at the baseball Hall of Fame over the weekend and overheard a guy talking to his son about how Rafael Palmeiro cheated and took steroids, and he was talking with such disgust. It would be wise if the voters just accepted the steroid era and voted in the guys that were the best players during the time. To shut them all out when it was pretty obvious what was going on at the time is insane and hypocrisy at it's best.
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I totally agree. As much as people like to dis baseball I think this purist attitude comes from the hold that baseball has on the national sports psyche that no other sport has. For a lot of people baseball is the first sport a lot of kids play and the Dad & kid at a ballgame is a fond memory in a lot of minds. Baseball may not have the passionate following that football has but it does have deep happy memories for lots of sports fans in the USA.
I think the MLB record book should have a preamble that adresses the fact that at some point the ball was dead, then it was lively, then the pitchers mound was lowered, then most parks had astroturf, then players in large numbers took PEDs and each of these changes had an impact on the game and the records. When looking at this book please keep these facts in mind.