Chances are, Carlos Beltrán will be inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame this year – or next. Rafael Palmeiro is unlikely to ever darken its door.
Beltrán was a major figure in the Houston Astros’ electronic sign-stealing scandal, which tarnished the 2017 World Series and led to two managers being suspended for a year and Beltran losing his chance to manage the New York Mets soon after his retirement.
Palmeiro, on the other hand, turned out to be a relatively minor player in baseball’s disgraceful steroid era. He tested positive for the PED stanozolol (also called Winstrol) and was suspended for a grand total of 10 days during the period when MLB was still trying to work out a stronger testing and disciplinary program with the players union.
Absent any of this, both players clearly would be obvious candidates for Cooperstown. Beltrán’s numbers are impressive, and Palmeiro’s are almost off the charts. He is the very rare player with more than 3,000 hits, 550 home runs and 1,800 RBIs and would have been a slam-dunk first-ballot guy under different circumstances.
So why will Beltrán get a pass and Palmeiro, who actually had some plausible deniability at the time, is still considered a pariah?
It’s a fair question, and it comes down to a couple of issues, one of which is simply the different way HOF voters and the general baseball public view steroids and other forms of cheating.
Everyone knows that Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry spent a large part of his career soaking baseballs in his saliva, but that was during an era when trying to get away with cheating was a time-honored tradition. Everyone of a certain age remembers the comedic moment when Joe Niekro tried to fool two umpires by pulling his hand out of his back pocket and surreptitiously flinging a small emery board into the air.
Perhaps the most famous moment of baseball’s golden age – Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” – was eventually outed as the result of an illegal sign-stealing scam.
That’s just an interesting piece of baseball lore, but the sport had to put the hammer down when it became public knowledge the Astros reached and won a World Series with an intricate sign-stealing scheme that involved live video piped into a dugout tunnel at Minute Maid Park and pitch information relayed to hitters by a series of bangs on dugout trash can.
Beltrán’s HOF candidacy might have been more problematic if MLB had suspended him for a year like the managers involved or vacated the Astros’ world title, but disciplining all the players who were either involved or knew about the scheme was simply impractical.
If Beltrán is getting a pass, it’s because he did suffer the indignity of being hired and fired as Mets skipper before managing a game and also because he owned up to his part in the scandal.
Palmeiro tested positive after he appeared before Congress and angrily denied that he had ever taken illegal steroids, and he was the first superstar player to be caught in MLB’s new testing program.
He argued at the time that he might have gotten a tainted B-12 injection and that it made no sense for him to take the risk of using steroids when he already had glittering Hall of Fame credentials and knew that he was subject to testing.
It is entirely possible that if he accepted a B-12 injectable from a teammate it could have been laced with Stanozolol, since there was – at the time – an over-the-counter self-injectable product sold in South America that contained both B-12 and the offending steroid.
Nevertheless, Palmeiro’s Hall of Fame hopes were toast. His name was checked on just 11 percent of HOF ballots in his first year of eligibility and he never came close to winning induction.
Perhaps some day he’ll get some consideration from one of the veterans committee incarnations, but the fact that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were recently rebuffed by the “Contemporary Era” committee does not suggest that forgiveness is imminent for Palmeiro.
However, I predicted in a Baltimore Sun column many years ago that there would come a time when the steroid outrage would wane to the extent that players connected to the PED scandal would have a chance for HOF induction and that has come to pass.
This year’s HOF ballot included six players known to at least come under serious PED suspicion. I voted for two of those who were known to have used PEDs – Manny Ramirez and Andy Pettitte. I voted for Ramirez because this is his last year on the BBWAA ballot and Pettitte because he risked a lot by admitting to his mistake and sacrificed his long friendship with Clemens by implicating him in the scandal.
I’ll expand on why I didn’t vote for Alex Rodriguez and my feelings about Bonds, Clemens and Pete Rose as we get closer to the HOF announcement later this month.