Is the Baseball Hall of Fame Changing Its Mind About Doping? – The Atlantic

By the numbers, Piazza was a cert for the Hall. He’s a 12-time all-star, possibly the best-hitting catcher in the sport’s history with 427 career home runs (a record for the position), and his career is a classic Cinderella story. He was picked in the 62nd round of the 1988 draft, as the 1390th overall player, by the Los Angeles Dodgers as a favor to his father, who was friends with the Dodgers’ manager, Tommy Lasorda. The team signed him to a tiny contract, but he quickly proved himself as a hitter and was named Rookie of the Year in 1993, his first full season in the major leagues.

He was traded in 1998, bouncing to the Florida Marlins and then to the New York Mets, where he led the team to the World Series in 2000. He contributed one of modern baseball’s most significant moments on September 21, 2001, during the Mets’ first game in New York after 9/11, when he hit a home run in the eighth inning, prompting wild celebration from a tense crowd. (He’s also the only baseball player with a Belle and Sebastian song named after him.)

But Piazza, always a bulked-up player (as was the trend among sluggers in the 1990s), has long endured rumors that he used steroids, partly because of his unusual leap to success from obscurity deep in the draft. Though he admitted to using a substance called androstenedione, favored by many hitters in the early ’90s when it was available over-the-counter and hadn’t yet been banned by the MLB, he denied any serious steroid use in his memoir, Long Shot, released in 2013. Either way, the rumors were undoubtedly what kept him from gaining entry to the Hall in his first three tries, and his admission in 2016 could be a turning point in the museum’s attitude towards the steroid era.

Stars like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who would be automatic first-ballot Hall of Famers had they not been linked to performance-enhancing drugs, both saw upticks in their vote totals this year, to 44 and 45 percent respectively. The museum has purged some of its older voters from the rolls—you now can’t participate if you haven’t written about baseball in 10 years—and younger voters may have a more inclusive attitude, looking to acknowledge baseball’s stars, warts and all. Both Clemens and Bonds have been on the ballot for four years; the question is whether attitudes will shift that much before their time runs out.