Bottom line, MLB tacitly encouraged players to use PEDs from the early 1990s until 2002. Fay Vincent may have issued an impotent reminder that steroids were not allowed, but such a missive with no actual enforcement (along with millions of dollars on the line for those who produced the best results, clean or not), as well as celebrating the PED-enhanced accomplishments of those obviously juicing (see the 1998 HR race), is clearly an encouragement to use.
I, for one, think Clemens deserves to be a first-ballot HoFer for two reasons:
1. Empirically, PEDs helped hitters more than pitchers. If not, we would not have seen the explosion in offensive numbers, just bigger pitchers and hitters mostly cancelling each other out. So what pitchers like Clemens, Pedro, and Maddux accomplished, regardless of whether any of them were clean, was remarkable.
2. No one put up numbers like Clemens. He was the best pitcher of his era. Again, MLB encouraged PED use with its laissez-faire enforcement policy. PED use was rampant, and Clemens produced exceptional results. The era happened, baseball needs to make itself accountable, and the best players of that era, like Bonds and Clemens, clearly belong in Cooperstown.
And yes, although this trial is way back in the line in terms of why we have a 14-figure national debt behind many other things we can't afford (say, the military industrial complex, corporate welfare, bailouts, mismanaged entitlement programs, the embarrassingly ineffective and pointless "War on Indvidual Liberty...er, Drugs", earmarks, etc.), it certainly doesn't help. It's apolitical grandstanding by an increasingly irrelevant legislative body of cowards too timid to do its job and address the issues the people who elect them desperately need addressed.
