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Originally Posted by RedFanAlways1966
Can it be proven (writers knew)? It is a two-way street though. Perhaps the writers did not know during those players' careers (do you have proof that says otherwise, if so please share). Of course we all hear the defenders of these players say there is no proof that they did PEDs. You say the writers knew at the time. But many fellow defenders of these players say there is no proof. Can "the defenders" have it both ways?!?
But letting the writers decide these things has always been a bad idea IMO.
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Well, I agree with you on the last point.
Earlier in this thread, you stated that "Perhaps the Union (who did all it could to avoid testing) and their teams (do not insult my intelligence by claiming they knew nothing)..." So you'll take it for granted that the Union and owners -- whose job it is to protect the players and their teams, respectively -- knew what was going on, but defend the writers -- whose job it is to report the truth -- on grounds of ignorance?
I am not saying that all writers knew what was going on, and I have no idea what kind of "proof" they had (I think that's moot, really, because I think most of them didn't even bother to pursue the story). And I am certainly not "defending" the players. I am speaking specifically to what I see as moral relativism and self-interest by the writers. Maybe they didn't all know, but there is no way -- no way -- that there wasn't a whiff enough of a story to pursue. There was enough of that whiff
in public, among people with no access to the players. And no one was willing to do that in 1998, when McGwire and Sosa were saving baseball and making baseball journalism relevant again. No one was willing to do that, in fact, until there was a whipping boy or two that was a sure bet to sell some papers and the public got hungry for a new story. When it was clear that the public was willing to turn on certain players, then the journalists followed suit. It didn't happen the other way around. And it was clear that the public was going to turn on the players, because it's easier to turn on a well-known face and a hero than it is a faceless owner or a boring nebulous union. So that's what the writers went with.
I have mixed feelings about the HOF and I'm not even sure how I feel about certain people getting in. But the fact that these men have not been proven guilty of anything, that their whole careers went by without punishment, and now the writers of all people have anointed themselves as the ones to impose judgment and repercussions on them, because nobody else has found a way to do it legally...I think it's awful. It makes the Hall of Fame entry criteria even more ambiguous than it used to be (which I did not think possible). And that, frankly, makes the Hall of Fame kind of a joke.