Tony La Russa makes bold claim about steroid users going to the Hall of Fame
Add Tony La Russa to the list of old-school baseball guys who have chimed in on the ongoing controversy involving players from the so-called “Steroids Era” going into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
La Russa told MLB Network Radio that players should be allowed in, but with asterisks on their plaques.
“I do believe that it’s a black mark, as far as what your production was,” LaRussa said of players whose lofty statistics were compiled during the period of steroid use. “But you know, pitchers (are) using it, hitters are using it, and if you were great during that period I would not vote against you.
But, LaRussa said he would differentiate players from that era.
“I just would maybe have an asterisk on your plaque, and I know that’s not what Joe (Morgan) was saying but there’s already been some guys that you question that have been inducted,” LaRussa said.
Morgan, the Hall of Famer who set the baseball world on fire with a strongly-worded open letter to Hall of Fame voters in November urging them not to vote for any players known to have used performance-enhancing drugs during their careers.
Then again, La Russa wouldn’t have built the reputation he has without a generous amount of anabolic assistance.
The “Bash Brothers” — Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire — practically turned themselves into super mutants with the amount of steroids they pumped into themselves while they were on La Russa’s Oakland A’s teams that went to three straight World Series, winning the title in 1989.
La Russa also managed McGwire in St. Louis, part of a tenure in which he led the team to a World Series title in 2006 before the Mitchell Report blew the lid off the Steroids Era. Were those guys juiced too? Rumors have been floating about Albert Pujols for more than a decade.
La Russa understands this, and he addressed it as well.
“I don’t know the credibility I have because I know when I got in, same thing with Joe Torre and Bobby Cox. They managed guys that had some enhancements, and they had some wins because of it,” La Russa said.
“My opinion’s not really worth much because people will think that I OK’d (the use of PEDs), which is not true.”
If La Russa didn’t OK it, he certainly had to crane his neck pretty far to look the other way. Canseco made that abundantly clear in his book “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big” in 2005.
The question nobody seems to want to answer in regards to throwing all these asterisks around is just how far the rabbit hole goes.
After all, Babe Ruth hit 714 career home runs in an era when only white players were allowed to play in Major League Baseball. Does that warrant an asterisk?
Does Gaylord Perry deserve an asterisk because after a career in which he won 314 games, he admitted he threw a spitball for most of his career?
And then there are the greats of the game who couldn’t get up for a game without taking enough amphetamines to power an episode of “Breaking Bad.” Greenies were as much a part of baseball as overpriced warm beer and the seventh inning stretch before MLB outlawed them in 2005. How much of their careers need to be differentiated?
The point here is that even La Russa seems to understand that he’s got no authority to speak on the matter, but people keep asking questions, and “no comment” just doesn’t fly anymore.
So with the Hall election drawing ever closer, we’ll hear more of this, all while it seems unlikely that guys like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will get the 75 percent of votes they need to clear the hurdle and get their names enshrined in Cooperstown. A recent straw poll of Hall voters estimated Bonds and Clemens at about two-thirds of the vote, which isn’t going to get them in.
If they do get in, it’s because they were the greats of an era where they juiced … and so did everyone else.
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