Baseball

But my gripe is with the exclusions of Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, while men like Ty Cobb are enshrined.

The Hall of Fame should reset every 20 years and it should reflect the performance of players in their era regardless of their off-the-field exploits...this does NOT however apply to steroid users. Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire and the rest are asterisks on their own era and a stain on the competitive continuity of the game in general. Their entire era - where someone like Brady Anderson out of the blue went for 50 HRs in 1990 and never hit more than 24 in any other season of his career - is suspect.

In baseball history, there have been 46 seasons where a player put up 50 Hrs:

Babe Ruth did it 4 times before anyone else in MLB history did it once...Hack Wilson in 1930.
From 1880 to 1950, the feat was achieved just 11 times by just 6 people.
From 1995 to 2007, the feat was achieved 22 times by 14 different players.
From 2008 to 2020, the feat was achieved just 5 times by 5 separate players.
Still above historic rates, but nothing like the steroids era...

70 years to get to 11 times.
12 years to DOUBLE it to 22 times?
That means HRs were being accumulate at the top of the leader's lists at a rate nearly 12X faster than historical average to that time...we know why now, it was the steroids era - 1995 through 2007.


Yes, band-box stadiums, diluted pitching staffs and more emphasis on HRs instead of fundamental baseball contributed to that, and still do today...by not anything like what happened when baseball looked the other way and allowed needle-pumped up behemoths pound them out of the 1994 WS cancellation and falling attendance and ennui in general towards baseball.

I LOVED the game more than anything from the 70's to 1994. It has NEVER recovered for me and I will forever say the players of the steroid era should NEVER be in the current HOF...