People view juicing as a black and white take the drug or don’t choice, and it’s actually very grey. What substances are banned? Are we doing Olympic style banned substances and levels, or NFL style banned substances and levels?
What if a natural food increases your testosterone levels somewhat so you eat 40 oysters a day, is that cheating? What if someone crushes a bunch of reject oysters into a liquid or powder and you wash it down avocado extract?
What if instead of avocado extract you use horse semen? What if while training you get inflammation and take cortizone injections?
Pretty much every athlete takes a supplement, many get injections, a lot of supplements are meant to increase the levels of naturally occurring hormones in the body…but there’s a limit as to how much that hormone can be otherwise it’s a failed drug test. So if the limit is 10x and they test at 9.9x they’re clean, but 10.1 and they’re banned from the Olympics for 6 years or whatever and labeled a cheat.
Yet we draw a random black and white line on cheating when there are probably many HOFers that ‘cheated’ just as much as those we’ve labelled steroid users who also never failed any tests.
With the Olympics and current testing athletes know the rules, don’t punish those who broke a rule that never existed.
I’m defining juicing as on “he took the juice”. I don’t give a shit if gave an advantage or not. But we wouldn’t be having this discussion if they all just sucked ass, would we?
That’s wasn’t my intention, and there are a few threads going on that are confusing things. I’m in favor of keeping folks out of the hall during their lifetime if they broke the juicing rules in existence during their careers. If we suddenly got a lot of good evidence that people in the hall who are still alive broke the juicing rules on the books when they were playing then I say pull them out and see if they get voted in again after they die. I’m not saying judge past players by current rules.
If their numbers are good enough and they played long enough they can be in my Hall of Fame. Palmeiro is like the most unnecessary PED user ever. He was plenty good enough before taking them and I don’t remember him ever being injured when I followed him. It’s 1B for f***’s sake. You stand there and catch the ball and occasionally make a 100 foot throw. He already hit for enough power and had a sweet swing before steroids. Just unbelievably stupid and unnecessary.