Joe Morgan’s letter reminded us how silly it is to keep PED users out of the Hall of Fame

On a list of living Hall of Famers with a right to be incredibly annoyed at the thought of performance-enhancing drugs, Joe Morgan is close to the top. He’s listed at 5’7”, 160 pounds, which means there’s a strong chance he’s actually smaller than that. And he had to use all of it to become one of the greatest baseball players the sport has ever seen. His strength was a compact strength, like 100 bouillon cubes stacked atop each other, and he built his legacy with a grace and athleticism that defied all expectations.

I’m not mad that he’s mad. Really, it’s understandable. Morgan wrote a letter to Hall of Fame voters imploring them not to consider players who took performance-enhancing drugs. It was an earnest letter from a baseball legend. It’s also completely unhelpful.

We’ll start with the required disclaimer for anything related to PEDs:

Think of it as a workplace issue and not something more dramatic than that. Let’s say my job is taken by a baseball writer who drinks a potion that makes him or her write better than me. This potion also causes his or her pinkie toes to fester and burn off. I have the right to be angry that my livelihood was affected because of someone taking shortcuts and physical risks that I was unwilling to take.

This scenario assumes I’m alive and active at exactly the same moment in time as the mystery writer, though. This is the problem with Morgan’s letter.

Morgan has a right to be annoyed, but even though he’s a baseball great who played the game, he can’t consider himself an expert on the PED era. He didn’t play in it. He wasn’t presented with the choice. He didn’t have teammates who felt energized and fresh in August after 17 games in 17 days, acting as human infomercials for the Cream or Clear, and he wasn’t playing in the shadow of two beloved, adored players who were widely praised for saving the sport. He thinks he knows what he would have done. But he really, really doesn’t.

I’m always reminded of Mike Schmidt’s sage words.

“I’m not saying I definitely would have, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you there’s no way,” he said. “Who knows? I truly can’t make the statement, ‘I wouldn’t have gotten caught up in it.’ ”

This is the only correct take. You can tell yourself, “Oh, I would have told those British jerks what’s up and taken up arms with General Washington,” or you can realize that you’ll never understand the context of every individual decision made during the Revolutionary War. You’ll never understand what motivated about half of the country to oppose the war. It’s a subject worth studying and debating, but there’s nothing more useless than mentally traveling through time and inserting your 2017 (or 1968) self into the argument. It’s like trying to jam an external hard drive into an ancient computer that uses punchcards.

What you have, then, is a choice.

The first choice is a Hall of Fame that’s a museum that celebrates and acknowledges baseball’s varied, human history. This is Cap Anson, the first player with 3,000 hits and a virulent racist. This is Ty Cobb, one of the most complicated, poisonous men to play the sport. This is Juan Marichal, who committed assault with a deadly weapon in the middle of a game. This is Kirby Puckett, domestic abuser. This is Pete Rose, an amazing player who committed baseball’s gravest sin. This is Barry Bonds, who was already a Hall of Famer before taking PEDs but evolved into a baseball freak after using.

The second choice is a combination Hall. One wing is the Hall of People Who Never Had the Chance to Use Steroids. They might have, or they might not have. But they didn’t get the chance, so they’re in. Good for them for never having to make the choice, I guess?

If you’ll go down that hallway and take a left, you have the Hall of People Who Played After We Were All Very, Very Clear That Steroids Were Off-Limits. They saw the culture of shame and resentment that came with getting caught. The benefits were just as alluring, but now there were penalties and stigmas attached.

What this combination Hall assumes is that all of the people who don’t fit in either one were Bad People. Those were people who were ethically defunct, and they were entirely contained within a period from 1986 and 2006. There were no bad people who would have used PEDs before then. There were no bad people who used after.

It ignores the context of the PED era. It ignores how feted and revered Mark McGwire was. It ignores that he felt comfortable giving interviews with a massive jug of the still-legal androstenedione in plain sight. It ignores that everyone — yes, writers, too — pretty much had an idea that there was a correlation between baseball’s new class of bodybuilders and the drugs traditionally used by real bodybuilders. It ignores that baseball was slow to act because it was still drunk off the 1998 wine and happy the sport survived the strike.

It ignores that amphetamines are really, really bad for the human body, and that for years, the players who were willing to hurt themselves by taking amphetamines held an unfair advantage over the players who weren’t willing. If you think that’s a false equivalency, you’re underestimating either the positive effects amphetamines can have on a tired player’s performance or the negative effects they can have on a human’s heart.

This combination, revisionist Hall ignores that the only thing all of these eras have in common is that they’re stuffed with people. Actual living, breathing people responding to the choices presented to them. The people from the PED era weren’t ethically shakier. They were just playing in an era with unique, specific choices that were considered radioactive with the benefit of hindsight. And I don’t want my story of baseball to have pages ripped out because of the sanctimonious, self-assured morality of the flawed people who look back at flawed people throughout history and think, “Wow, look at how flawed those people were. Thank goodness I’m not flawed.”

Future generations will think we’re really, really weird. Because of everything. But when it comes to baseball and the Hall of Fame, specifically. Morgan has a right to be annoyed. But we have the right to demand a Hall of Fame that accurately reflects history. Pretending like the people who used PEDs have souls that are more corroded than the people who never had a chance, well, that’s revisionist history.

I’d like less revisionist history in my museums, please.