Voters for the Hall of Fame claim that the Hall's ‘morality’ clause keeps them from voting for suspected or proven steroid users. First, steroids were not illegal in baseball until 2003. Anyone using prior to 2003 is actually less guilty than baseball players who used amphetamines in the 1960s. Second, how about players who threw the spitball after 1920?
Most importantly, regarding a morality clause. That is hogwash, just the popular soapbox that the narcissistic press has stepped upon. Baseball never actually cared about morality in its personnel. And prior to 1944, nor with its commissioner. Cap Anson was one of the most guilty players when it came to the color line. If you have read much on Anson, you will know that he bullied other teams to hold back their black players from competing, or he would threaten them with pulling his team off the field and there would be no game ... nor desperately-needed gate receipts. Soon, there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” that blackballed all non-white players from professional baseball. And commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis fought tooth and nail to keep the ‘agreement’ active.
Anson and Landis were among the first to be inducted into Cooperstown.
Also worth addressing is the argument that racism did not affect a player’s statistics: rubbish. Had Cap Anson, Ty Cobb, had any pre-1947 player been facing all races, their stats would have been quite a bit less than they turned out. Had Babe Ruth faced Satchel Paige, Rube Foster or the other great Negro League pitchers as many times as even the other teams’ middle-of-the-rotation starters, it is hard to expect that Ruth would have finished with so many home runs.
If you can let baseball people into the Hall that fought with every fiber of their being to keep baseball lily-white, then there is no such thing as a morality clause. Picking and choosing morality is self-righteousness, not morality at all.
