batmagadanleadoff

Evening quiz for a foggy winter's day. Tom Seaver's lifetime WHIP of 1.1208 is the second career highest among all pitchers that pitched for the Mets. Round out the top 15. One guess per post. (Min. 1,000 innings pitched) 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2. Tom Seaver 1.1208

They get too much credit for contributing to a team win when they "save" a game, and too much damn blame for the loss when they blow a save. Usually.

To use their limited resources on a "closer" when the team probably won't win half their games, even with the prime of Mariano, is dumb.

Edgy MD wrote: Pretty compelling PED article from the magic year of 1969. That issue was among the very first SI's I ever leafed through. The needle on that cover gave me the godamn creeps.

What's wrong with us?

metirish wrote: For fucks sake, look at the thinking with this twat that writes for the Boston Globe ... But that did not stop Massarotti from voting for both Clemens and Bonds. His reasoning was that Bonds and Clemens would have been Hall of Famers even if they did not use steroids.... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/sports/baseball/mike-piazza-falls-short-in-hall-of-fame-voting.html?_r=0 That's the Derek Jeter defense. Because Jeter is already a first ballot lock for the Hall, he's earned the right to take steroids and PED's openly for the rest of his career without fear of jeopardizing his HOF candidacy.

Swan Swan H wrote: OK. Give me some crap about Claudell Washington. Claudell is a distant relative of Duane and Gregg Allman of the Allman Brothers. Their families emigrated from Germany in the late 1800s, and their family name of Allmendinger was Americanized differently upon arrival. With no talent for the slide guitar, Claudell took up base-sliding as a hobby instead, and eventually, baseball. What's the crap with Les Rohr?

Ceetar wrote: I'm not sure when everyone started thinking Scott Hairston was Justin Upton, but they've already signed a bunch of guys with at least a passing chance of equating what Hairston did/is worth for a fraction of the price.

Jim Gosger was the third player to appear in games as a NY Met in three separate seasons without ever getting his own Mets Topps baseball card. Rick Herrscher?

I think that the Wilpons' ascendancy from minority owners to something more is probably the worst event in franchise history. Worse even than the Seaver midnight massacre trade.

Out of nowhere, bam, [Kevin Mitchell] slugged Darryl [strawberry] right in the face. Then he hit him again, and knocked Straw down. It took a couple of us to pull him off, and I swear I never saw a punch that connected so cleanly. As much as I hated to see it, Mitch really did beat the hell out of Darryl. Later that year, in 1986, we were in the middle of a bench-clearing brawl with the Pirates, and amid all the mini-fights, I saw Mitch overpower Pittsburgh's shortstop Sammy Khalifa. He took Khalifa down, got on top of him, and applied a choke hold. I couldn't believe my eyes, because Mitch was doing more than just trying to beat up Khalifa; he was attempting to kill him. Indeed, Khalifa's eyes were wide and unseeing, and it suddenly occurred to me that he was being strangled to death. Several players, including a few Mets who saw what was going on, pulled Mitch off him Heat: My Life On and Off the Diamond, Dwight Gooden with Bob Klapisch insult to injury http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19860614&id=IrUqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=9WIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6146,9020068

Sandy Alderson promises more 2013 improvements, somehow By Howard Megdal 3:09 pm Dec. 18, 2012 With two months until pitchers and catchers report to spring training, David Wright re-signed, and R.A. Dickey traded, the New York Mets now turn their attention to the rest of the 2013 roster. General manager Sandy Alderson discussed his plan to add outfielders, along with a starting pitcher to replace Dickey in the rotation, bullpen help, additional starting pitching depth, and even another catcher. All of this makes sense, in terms of what a minimally competent major league team needs. But it's not clear how they'll do this with the money at their disposal. According to Ken Davidoff, the Mets have about $7 million to spend this winter. (Davidoff confirmed via Twitter that this came from a team official.) By itself, that is problematic, considering that the Mets had every one of the needs described above, with the exception of replacing Dickey, at the start of the offseason. $7 million for those tasks isn't much. It's a surprisingly small number, actually: Since the start of the offseason, they've retained Wright, and structured his contract extension so that he'll earn a salary $5 million less than he'd been scheduled to earn, with another $3 million of the 2013 salary deferred. That alone should give them more than $7 million for this winter. Also, when the Mets bought out Jason Bay earlier this offseason, Bay agreed to defer the lion's share of his $21 million still owed to him until 2014-15, receiving just $6 million in 2013. Add that together, and the Mets should have $23 million to spend on this offseason, even if they hadn't budgeted a dime toward other improvements beforehand. So where's that money going? It would be nice to think that the Mets are just putting this money aside for more fruitful, future uses, just as it would have been nice to believe that's what the team was doing when they cut salary from $143 million in 2011 to $91 million in 2012. But there's no indication that that's what's happening. The reality has been, and continues to be, that ownership is redirecting whatever funds it can from what would otherwise go toward player salaries for their financial survival. With revenues continuing to plummet at Citi Field, and enormous loans to service, the team has been cannibalized, with the results clear for anyone to see. Alderson can keep building the minor league system, as he has done, to his credit. But the situation on the field in Flushing is dire in the meantime, and through no fault of Alderson's. No one could be expected to fill an outfield, add a starting pitcher, find a backup catcher and, oh right, fix a bullpen that finished 29th in the league in E.R.A. last season with the resources the Mets owners have reportedly put at his disposal. There's no real way around spending, either. The Mets don't have much to give up on the trade market, and a new collective bargaining agreement, with caps and strict penalties, has resricted other shortcut options like international and over-slot signings. What Alderson is doing is building the Mets for 2015, while Fred Wilpon and his partners do what they can to stick around till then. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/sports/2012/12/6910129/sandy-alderson-promises-more-2013-improvements-somehow

This thread is a big blow to my Met fan bona fides. I don't recall this player at all.

Chad Ochoseis wrote: I saw him pitch at Nats Park against Strasburg in July 2010, when Strasburg starts were known locally as "Strasmas" and you still had to explain to non-New Yorkers what an "R. A. Dickey" was. Dickey outpitched Strasburg through six. Parnell and Frankie blew the game. I remember that game about as well as any Dickey start. That was the pre-injury, better than the Big Train Strasburg. Often, when I log onto this site with Dickey on my mind, I'm reminded of a terrific photo of RA snapped by Ceetar a few years ago. It's an overhead shot of Dickey capturing the pitcher right after releasing his pitch. Dickey's follow-through momentum carried him to the front of the mound which, from Ceetar;s persepective, looks round, but flat, like a sumo wrestler's ring. Dickey is in full Dickeyface mode, growling towards the plate, defending his section of the infield ferociously. It's one of my favorite action shots of Dickey.

Report: Citi Field Took $8 Million Revenue Hit This Year As the New York Mets try to improve their fortunes on the field, they're reportedly losing more money off it. According to Newsday, the team's ballpark-related revenue fell more than $8 million from 2011 to just under $119 million this year. Additionally, it's down more than $61 million from 2009 when Citi Field opened. The paper also says revenue from Citi Field's premium seats fell nearly $6.5 million from 2011. Experts blame the drop in premium ticket revenue on lower prices and the Mets' poor showing in the second half of this season. The paper says Citi Field's revenue, including premium seats, concessions and parking has dropped off 43 percent since 2009. The Mets are raising overall ticket prices next season for the first time since the ballpark opened. http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/174175/report--citi-field-took--8-million-revenue-hit-this-year

Anybody......?

I wish I had some pizza.

Coleman: Is Mets� Offer To Wright Worth Its Weight In Gold? November 29, 2012 1:41 PM By Ed Coleman Not so fast there, people. David Wright has himself a pretty nice deal on paper or in print, doesn�t he. Or does he? Well, it depends who you talk to, and right now the only people talking are the Mets, making sure they get their point across after taking heat from fans concerning their inaction during what seemed like long and somewhat dormant negotiations for both Wright and R.A. Dickey. Wright had three wishes that he desired as he approached this off-season looking at a contract extension that could possibly take him to the end of his career. First, as he stated many times during the season, he wanted to remain a Met-for-life like the Ripkens, Jeters, etc. that have preceded him, be a one-uniform guy. Secondly, it was his desire that the negotiation process remain confidential, free from outside pressures that constantly seem to derail talks, especially here in New York. Hard to do? Yes. But that�s already been broken, because one side talked and it wasn�t Wright�s. And finally, Wright wanted to know what the plan was, the team�s commitment to winning, if he was going to sign up long-term for it. Wright wants to finish what he started with this team and bring a championship to the organization during his time. There have been a lot of comparisons drawn to Evan Longoria�s recent contract extension, but how valid they are can certainly be debated. Longoria is 27 and coming off an injury-shortened season in which he hit 17 HR and had 55 RBI in 74 games. He also plays for a team that has had 3 consecutive 90-win seasons. Longoria has also played in more than 133 games just twice in his 5-year career. Wright will be 30 on December 20, has been an island in a depleted Met lineup for several seasons now, and has averaged 149 games per during his 8 seasons thus far. The MLB Players Union has valued Longoria�s new contract at 10 years and $131 million - the present day value reduced from $136.6 million due to deferred money. And therein lies the sticking point with Wright�s contract. There are significant deferrals in Wright�s deal, as well as back-loaded money towards the end of the contract. If money�s back-loaded, it�s within the confines of the deal, just toward the back end. If it�s deferred, it�s outside or after the context of the deal. So what rubs the Wright camp the wrong way is to say that the deal is worth $140 million � that�s inaccurate, and not even close in present day value. And it�s why Wright wanted to keep these dealings confidential. If indeed Johan Santana�s franchise-record $137.5 million contract is a benchmark that the Wright camp is shooting for, it won�t be topped when you factor in the considerable deferred money. Is Wright happy with the way this was handled? No. Is he angry? No. Somewhat disillusioned? Yes. Do I think a deal will eventually get done? Yes, probably within a week�s time. But it might have been already done if people had kept their lips sealed.... http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/11/29/coleman-is-wrights-deal-worth-its-weight-in-gold/

Ceetar wrote: What's with this 'current value' stuff lately? seems like a new buzzword. Present value. Some crazy money theory cooked up by the newfangled wave of economists. It's like the sabermetrics of finance. I will gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today.

metirish wrote: Martino also reported that the deal is backloaded. He didn't have specifics, but suggested that the structure of the contract was similar to that of Jose Reyes with his now-former team, the Miami Marlins no specifics?, a minor detail, do carry on. That's what Martino wrote: But league officials briefed on the talks revealed new information about the structure of the Mets� offer. Those sources said that the proposed extension was backloaded with a structure similar to the contract Jose Reyes got from the Marlins last winter. Reyes, who was later traded to Toronto, made $10 million in the first year of his deal, and will earn $10 million in the second. From there, the annual value skyrockets to $16 million and $22 million. While the numbers in the offer to Wright are different, and specifics are not known, the structure is similar to that of the Reyes contract, according to those sources. There is deferred money in the potential deal, consistent with the Mets� past agreements with Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana. Both of those players, who represent the largest contracts in team history, deferred about $5 million of their annual salary during many of their seasons in New York. http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/offer-wright-alley-article-1.1209909#ixzz2DdsLbDnp Edgy MD wrote: It diminishes me to read that guy, but then I do anyway. I don't see anything wrong with this Megdal piece, even if the author overstates the obvious -- namely that one can't accurately assess a contract without knowing the details regarding backloading and deferrals -- the payment schedule.

Ask not what the Mets can do for David Wright By Howard Megdal 11:15 am Nov. 29, 2012 It's decision time for the New York Mets and David Wright. Andy Martino reported in the Daily News Thursday morning that the Mets have presented "their best offer" to David Wright, and it would pay the third baseman a guaranteed $140 million over eight years. That's $16 million for 2013, an option already picked up by the Mets, along with $124 million over the following seven years. The payout, purely based on money and years, is a bit shy of the eight years, $160 million many observers believe Wright would earn on the free agent market next season. But it also means Wright avoids the risk of playing out another season without getting anything new in return. As presented to the media, it's a very fair offer. This being the Mets, though, there's more to the story. Martino also reported that the deal is backloaded. He didn't have specifics, but suggested that the structure of the contract was similar to that of Jose Reyes with his now-former team, the Miami Marlins. Reyes, remember, signed a six-year, $106 million deal with the Marlins last winter, but earned just $10 million in each of the first two seasons, $16 million the third year, and $22 million in each of the final three years. It is worth remembering that a dollar in hand today is worth more to Wright or anyone else than a dollar tomorrow. So the extent to which the contract is backloaded has a real effect on the total value of the package, particularly if Wright (accurately) believes he can earn the same contract from another team, paid out more evenly. $140 million is not $140 million, regardless of contract. But there's more. Just as the Mets management used to do with their players in the years they were heavily invested in Bernie Madoff's schemes, they are apparently asking Wright to defer a portion of his contract payout. How much deferred money is unclear, but this, too, has a real impact on the total value of the deal. For instance, the deferrals Johan Santana agreed to called for $5 million to be deferred each season for seven years, with 1.25 percent compound interest. So $5 million of his 2008 salary was withheld, earned interest, and gets paid out to Santana on June 30, 2015. That may sound like a good deal for Santana, but it isn't. It brings the overall value of his contract down from $137.5 million to $123.1 million, a drop of more than 10 percent of the total value. If the Mets are asking the same of Wright, along with the backloaded structuring of a deal, what appears to be a $140 million offer could easily be more akin to another team offering him $100 million, paid out without deferrals and evenly over the life of a contract. Exactly how much the Mets are asking Wright to sacrifice is unknown without the particulars of the deferrals and contract structure. But it's not safe to assume the Mets have made a fair market deal without those particulars. And you can bet if those particulars do manifestly change the nature of the offer, the team won't leak them. It was a six-year, $100 million deal, remember, that Ken Rosenthal described back on Monday as "an offer that Wright is certain to refuse." What the Mets are doing, in terms of these negotiations and attendant leaks, makes sense above all as a public-relations strategy. If Wright signs, they get an off-season trophy, something in short supply in Flushing in recent winters, and they get it at a better-than-market rate. If Wright refuses, they get to paint him as a greedy and disployal villain, earning themselves a pass at least with whatever portion of the fan base will buy that Wright, an exemplary team guy, is just being selfish here. The "best offer" rhetoric seems to set the Mets up either finalize a deal with Wright for real, or to try to deal him at baseball's winter meetings, which begin Monday. For now, the Mets and their fans wait, and hope that Wright, who has gamely provided the public face of this team for years while ownership insulted his talent and the front office pressured him to play hurt, will take one more for the team. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/sports/2012/11/6715620/ask-not-what-mets-can-do-david-wright

November 27, 2012 Postscript: Marvin Miller, 1917-2012 Posted by Malcolm Gladwell There have always been two sides to American professional sports. The first is the beautiful game on the field. The second is the sordid world of the owner�s box, in which very rich men who call themselves capitalists build taxpayer-supported monopolies on the backs of players and fans. No one knew the second world better than Marvin Miller. He was a hard-nosed union man who took over the Major League Baseball Player�s Association in 1966. At the time, the relationship between the baseball owners and players was�to put it charitably�feudal. Under the so-called reserve clause, the owner held the rights to players in perpetuity. Players were paid, played, and traded at the whims of management. The players� union was run by someone appointed by the owners. When the owners wanted to change the terms of a player�s pension, they just went ahead and did it�and seemed stunned when the players thought that they ought to have been consulted. Within a decade, Miller put a stop to all of that. He called the first successful strike in the history of professional sports. He led the fight against the reserve clause. He ushered in free agency. The world that we see now, of multi-million-dollar contracts and players selling their talents on the open market, is the world that Marvin Miller created. I met Marvin Miller a few years ago. He was well into his nineties then, living in a high-rise on the Upper East Side. He was a slight man with a wispy moustache and a limited use of one arm. He was easy to underestimate�until he opened his mouth, and told you in full, unreconstructed Brooklynese, the way he saw things and the way you were going to see things, too. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, once accused Miller of failing to �reciprocate� his overtures of friendship. Miller responded that Kuhn was not trying to be friends, he was trying to �pick my brains,� and �there was scant possibility of reciprocity in that department.� After the end of our interview, Miller began to talk about the Hall of Fame. It was clear that the issue still rankled him. Baseball�s Hall of Fame has people in it whose primary contribution to the game was the particular way they called a home run from the broadcasting booth. It has people in it like the former Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, whose principal achievement was inheriting enough money to buy the Red Sox and waiting a full eighteen years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball�s color line to sign his first full-time black player. But Marvin Miller? He got voted down, again and again, the victim of a nominating committee handpicked by the owners. Even after he pried open their sport to the modern world, after he helped turn baseball from a feudal enterprise into a big business, the owners still hated him. Most of the time, the beautiful game overshadows the sordid world of the owner�s box. The best way to mourn the passing of Marvin Miller�one of the twentieth century�s great heroes�is to remember that there are still too many occasions when it does not. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2012/11/postscript-marvin-miller-1917-2012.html#ixzz2Dd0JAfLL

November 28, 2012 The Doomsday Ballot Posted by Ian Crouch History is messy; so is baseball. The Hall of Fame is full of players who spiked each other with their cleats or slicked up the ball or otherwise broke the rules. It is home to bigots and liars and drunks. And soon it may welcome, knowingly, a group of players whose successes may have been due, in part, to steroids. Five years have elapsed since Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa retired from baseball. That means they are all eligible for election into the Hall on the 2013 ballot, which was released on Wednesday afternoon. The voting, results of which will be released on January 9th, thus is something of a nightmare scenario for a sport that has spent the past decade refusing to credibly confront the full implications of what is now known as the steroid era. The way the balloting unfolds over the next month and a half won�t just influence the way history views the past twenty years of baseball; it could end up calling into question the role and value of the Hall of Fame itself. In any other scenario, Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa would, deservedly, be all but guaranteed election to the Hall on this first ballot: Bonds is a seven-time M.V.P. and the majors� all-time leader in home runs and walks; Clemens won three hundred and fifty-four games and seven Cy Young awards across three decades; and Sammy Sosa hit six hundred and nine home runs. Bonds and Clemens are perhaps the best left-handed hitter and right-handed pitcher, respectively, of all time. But there�s the other side of the story to consider, too: during his perjury trial, Bonds admitted to using steroids; Clemens� DNA was found along with traces of steroids and human-growth hormone among drug paraphernalia kept by his trainer, Brian McNamee (Clemens has denied taking steroids and disputes this evidence); and Sosa reportedly tested positive for steroids in 2003 (though he too has repeatedly denied taking illegal performance-enhancers). For the past few years, the Hall of Fame has rather clumsily been trying to sort out what to do about the legacy of performance-enhancing drugs. The disgraced home-run hero Mark McGwire, who has been eligible since 2007, has never gotten more than twenty-four per cent of the vote in ballots cast�seventy-five per cent is the threshold for entry�and last year he received his lowest vote total yet. His candidacy appears doomed. Rafael Palmeiro, who had more than three thousand career hits but tested positive for steroids in 2005, got just over twelve per cent of the Hall of Fame vote last year, his second on the ballot. Absent the connection to steroids, both players would have been locks for induction at Cooperstown, yet a large majority of the more than five hundred voters from the Baseball Writers� Association of America�the journalists who play gatekeepers for the Hall�have decided that confirmed users have no business being enshrined among the game�s greats. That decision may seem sensible and fair, but nothing about baseball�s steroid era is so simple. The Major Leagues didn�t even begin testing players for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs until 2002, and it wasn�t until 2005 that a strict and coherent punishment plan was put into effect. This despite years of rumblings about P.E.D. use dating back to the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly daily visual evidence that something was going on: McGwire�s arms, Bonds�s expanding head, the once-enduring records that were suddenly being smashed every season. We all looked the other way when McGwire, grown to Paul Bunyan in the flesh and keeping androstenedione on full display in his locker, whapped seventy home runs in 1998. Baseball writers, a group with members now wagging their fingers in disgust, penned paeans to the great slugger. Revisionists may point to Cal Ripken as the man who won baseball fans back after the strike season of 1994, but it was McGwire and Sosa who made baseball appointment viewing across the country. Both men violated a public trust, but the public was more than happy to meet them halfway. Now, with their uniforms hung up and their muscles melted away, we�d rather not think about them anymore. Further confusing the issue is that fact that neither McGwire nor Palmeiro�nor any other confirmed steroid user, for that matter�has been given an official post-retirement punishment or sanction. Pete Rose lives in exile, while McGwire was just hired as the hitting coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Bonds was welcomed back to San Francisco during the World Series in 2010 as a kind of beloved rascal. The current guidelines for voters, as ordered by the Baseball Writers� Association of America, include �integrity, sportsmanship, character� among the categories by which to judge a player. Yet that phrasing is patently vague�useful when a writer wants to come down hard on a steroid user, but markedly fishy when applied to some of the more ethically specious past inductees. Voters have no consistent way to judge confirmed steroid-users, since Major League Baseball doesn�t quite know what to do with these guys either�in other words, if these players aren�t banned from baseball, why is it obvious that they should be banned from Cooperstown? Things become even less clear when one considers a group of players who have never admitted to taking drugs and have not tested positive for anything, but who�because of their changing appearances, or just rumor and innuendo�have the taint of steroids attached to their name. Former Astros great Jeff Bagwell went from skinny-strong to gargantuan during his career. That turned heads and set people muttering, and despite a strong Hall of Fame case he has yet to get above fifty-six per cent of the vote. Joining him on the ballot this year is Mike Piazza, one of the best-hitting catchers ever, who has been followed by whispers of steroids as well. We don�t know if Bagwell or Piazza took steroids; they both say they didn�t. Few voters, it would seem, know for sure, either, and yet we are certain to see both players, and more after them, hurt by this lingering cloud. Jose Canseco, equal parts clown and whistleblower, was called a fool when he said that eighty per cent of baseball players took steroids. But Canseco has been right before, so let�s just say, for argument�s sake, that the true figure was anywhere close to his number. Were hitters cheating more than pitchers? How do you determine if players were using designer drugs that didn�t change how they looked? And, finally, who should be banned and who should be considered clean�what tools can baseball journalists use to label one player a cheater and another a saint? There are no good answers to these questions, and that�s Major League Baseball�s fault: when it ignored the steroid problem, it left an entire generation of players in historical limbo. If it wants to help the Hall of Fame maintain its relevance as shrine to the game�s great and a museum to its past, it should now offer voters official guidance. With so much confusion, the most equitable solution, no matter how unpalatable to the great moralists in the ranks of baseball reporters, is for the voters to do what they�ve always done and grant entry to even the tainted among the era�s great players, and for the Hall to use this as an opportunity to tell the story of the decades when the game was captivating and wonderful and blackened by scandal all at the same time. While they�re at it, it�s time for them to acknowledge another unpleasant part of baseball�s past�and the way it was overcome. The death of the famed baseball labor leader Marvin Miller reminds us that the Hall is also full of players who were denied a fair paycheck and the right to get a better deal from a team other than the one that owned them. In a Postscript about Miller, Malcolm Gladwell noted that the man who finally got the game�s on-field talent their due share of the wealth was never elected to its Hall of Fame. With his death, there is a growing chorus calling for that error to be corrected, for Miller to be voted in on the ballot for the class of 2014. Miller, of course, won�t be there to give the speech that he should have had the opportunity to deliver years ago, but at least one part of history will be set right. If, in a hundred years, mothers and fathers are still taking their sons and daughters to Cooperstown, they should visit the plaques to Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. But they should also hear the stories of Gaylord Perry�s spitballs, Ty Cobb�s sharpened spikes, and the decades in which the game excluded players of color. They should read phrases like �the reserve clause,� �antitrust exemption,� �free agency,� �strike,� and �BALCO.� And they should ask questions about how Roger Clemens, his legs like a bull�s, was still able to throw a blistering fastball well into his forties, and about Barry Bonds�s lightning-quick jerk of a swing, and all those baseballs that flew into McCovey Cove in San Francisco. Then they should get to read about what many players of this era did to themselves to be able to toss and bat those balls so well. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2012/11/the-doomsday-ballot.html#ixzz2DcvsokLD ____________________________________________ On Baseball Hall of Fame Voters Confront the Steroid Era and Its Questions By TYLER KEPNER Published: November 27, 2012 excerpt: Those three words � integrity, sportsmanship, character � are critical to some voters. �In each of those areas, players who used steroids fail the test � period,� Scott Miller, of CBSSports.com, said in an e-mail. �I know it isn�t the Hall of Choirboys. I know the stories about Ty Cobb and others who at times were miscreants. But I also know that the Steroid Era was one of the most shameful chapters in the game�s history. It made a mockery out of the record book. It pushed retired legends into the shadows when they should have remained in the spotlight, and it put the spotlight on others who never should have been there.� Miller continued: �To me, just because the commissioner, the owners and the players� union abdicated their responsibility to the game for so long by looking the other way only increases the obligation for somebody, somewhere, to stand up for what�s right. And if I can do that even from my small corner of the voting world, then I�m grateful to have that chance.� Miller�s colleague, Danny Knobler, said he initially voted for McGwire, but felt bad about it and reconsidered. Knobler now has a zero-tolerance policy. �I decided that for now, I will not vote for anyone where there is a reasonable belief that he could have used,� Knobler wrote in an e-mail. �I know some people dissect a career and try to determine if a player would have been a Hall of Famer without help. While I respect that view, my feeling is that if I�m voting against you, it�s because I believe there�s a reasonable likelihood that you cheated the game. If that�s the case, I don�t want to vote you into the Hall of Fame.� http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/sports/baseball/steroid-era-players-pose-difficulty-for-hall-of-fame-voters.html

I bid $40 million