Never Praise a Cheater
Being inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame is one of the greatest honors that can be bestowed upon a player. As such, only the greatest and most honorable players of all time should make it into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Barry Bonds, though one of the greatest baseball players of all time, should not be put into the Hall of Fame. Bonds, or any player that has taken steroids, should never be allowed into the Hall of Fame. Using steroids is against the rules of Major League Baseball and is flat-out cheating. Being inducted into the Hall of Fame should not honor anybody who cheats. Now, some might say, ‘Bonds never tested positive for steroids.’ Bonds did, however, transform from a small into a huge man overnight. Bonds showed every symptom of steroids, even though he never actually tested positive. So, there is no doubt that he used steriods to enhance his performance on the field.
One argument for putting Bonds into the Hall of Fame: he had the numbers to be put in before he even took steroids, which, in fact, may be true. Yet, that doesn’t matter to the voters who decide if he’ll be in the Hall of Fame, for they look at the player’s whole career, not just a part of it. And part of Bond’s career was shadowed by his use of steroids, a use that deemed him a cheater. If you cheat on only part of a test, it doesn’t matter how much you cheated — it just matters that you did. Cheating in any way in the MLB should not be acceptable. If you allow cheating, it’s just encouraging others to cheat as well. If Major League Baseball doesn’t lay down the law about cheating, then they will never be able to stop it. That’s also why the MLB has to have lengthy suspensions for cheating and even ban players from the game.
It also isn’t fair to all the players who played the game clean and the right way, when Bonds and others were taking steroids. The game needs to be played on an equal playing field. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were able to put up great stats without performance enhancing drugs. Many often say Babe Ruth hit home runs on beer and hot dogs — not on steroids.
Barry Bonds played in an era where many players took drugs, often deemed “The Steroid Era.” Because Bonds played in a time where so many players were cheating, many will say ‘well everyone was doing it so it’s not a big deal, the playing field was equal.’ Yet, it isn’t, even if most were using PED’s, not everyone was and it’s not fair to the people that played the game without steroids. Just because others are cheating doesn’t make it right for you to cheat. If everybody else is committing crimes it doesn’t mean that it’s all right for you to as well.
The only way to truly see who the best players in the Major Leagues are is for everybody to play the game fair. Nobody is above the game.