What about McGwire and Palmeiro
How do we navigate through the PED mess?
The topic of steroids is probably the most divisive topic in Hall of Fame circles. I suppose the Black Sox scandal impacts a few guys more directly and the recent death of Pete Rose has thrust that topic back to the forefront. Still, no topic impacts as many guys as the steroids topic. It will be impossible to talk about Mark McGwire or Rafael Palmeiro without it coming up.
Still, there is a systematic way to go about these things and we should start strictly on the numbers we do have. Are THOSE numbers good enough for these two guys to get in? We will evaluate them with our usual tests and compare them with the Hall of Fame median across the board.
I should talk about the median for a moment for those just joining the conversation. It is not the literal HOF median. What I have done in previous articles is separate the top six first basemen out because they came in at greater than 120 percent of the overall index median. I also separated out the bottom four Hall of Fame first basemen because they came in below 80 percent of the Hall of Fame median. The median that you will see here is the median of the remaining first basemen on the list.
As per usual, we begin with the counting numbers because those are the numbers most Hall of Fame voters look at. I imagine these numbers are part of the problem. We will get to the steroids problem in due course, but we should just take the numbers at face value for now.
