There was a panel in Arizona last week which the topic of PED use was discussed. Among the panel members was Jane Leavy, who wrote what many consider to be the definitive biography of Mickey Mantle. Her take on players of the recent Steroids Era and the fitness of guys like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire for the Hall of Fame:
“I don’t have a vote, and I wouldn’t vote for any of them,” said Leavy—not a single one of the players who admitted drug use or were named in the Mitchell report on PEDs in baseball. “I think there should be a hall of shame for those guys,” she said.
I have no idea how one can write an entire biography of Mickey Mantle — complete with a passage in which Mantle’s visit to the infamous Max “Dr. Feelgood” Jacobson, where an amphetamines injection caused an infection that knocked him out of the home run race in 1961 — and conclude that while he is a worthy Hall of Famer, the guys of the 1990s and 2000s should be in a “Hall of Shame.” Let alone the many other players who used amphetamines in the 1950s and 60s, which she chronicled.
But I suppose this double standard is OK, as it always has been.
