Holier than Thou MLB fans (Braun, steroids, Hall of Fame rant)

This is directed towards the arm chair manager and sofa commentators of the world, You are so quick to throw players who are accused of taking illegal substances or PEDs under the bus yet you don't keep their achievements in perspective. Yes, Ryan Braun tested positive but do fans even bother find out for what and why? No. Jump on the bandwagon, believe the hype. "He took PEDs, he is a blatant cheater with no respect for the game." Fans are calling for Selig to take away his MVP award. Are you joking? There is a reason the MLB is a professional league and that is because they handle situations like this with class and a level-headedness that the NCAA could not dream of. While the NCAA makes a hasty decision to strip past awards that have already been won (Bush of the Heisman), the MLB accepts its awards as is. Once it is won, it is won. You cannot go back and take away awards based on allegations or even convictions. Should Kemp have won the NL MVP? Maybe. But he didn't. To think it would be good for the game for them to take it away from Braun and give it to Kemp is a joke.

Lets's take this Braun situation and look at it with a clear head. It is disappointing and upsetting to see one of the best and bright young players of the league fall victim to an epidemic that we thought was fleeting. However, the MLB is littered with cases that are discovered and hidden of players that took, take and will continue to use PEDs in some form to get a competitive edge over the rest of the league. With different eras come different edges. To think that players of the 1930s wouldn't have used anything to their advantage to win ball games is naive and near sighted. Yes, I think Ryan Braun was wrong but I'm not going to hate the player because of this. He made a mistake, get over it. A lot of fans act like they are flawless in character and action throughout life. Braun maybe wasn't taking PEDs to improve out of selflessness but recover from a nagging injury. While players in the 80s used cocaine and other drugs to last, Braun tried something different. They both had the same purpose. They were trying to outlast during a grueling 162 season to bring a World Series title home to their city.

Obviously, if it is proven that Ryan Braun intentionally took illegal performance-enhancing drugs, the legitimacy of his MVP award will be thrown into serious doubt, but I think Major League Baseball and the Baseball Writers Assn. of America will just have to grin and bear it.

The historical can of worms that would be opened by re-assigning the award would damage the credibility of the process as much or more than just accepting the fact that naming Braun the National League MVP seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Lest we forget, a guy named Barry Bonds has a whole room full of MVP trophies and Roger Clemens has a Cy Young Award to leave to every member of his family. It would be nice if we could sanitize history whenever it doesn’t retroactively live up to our expectations, but that’s just not practical. (Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun)

Here is a side note: For those that say the steroid users should be left out of the Hall of Fame, here is an argument that cannot be disputed. If you keep Bonds out of the Hall of Fame, how can you prove that half of the pitchers he hit bombs off of weren't on roids themselves? Why should this be looked at different than the fact that Babe Ruth never had to play against black players? Would Ty Cobb have had different numbers if he had to play any black players? Different eras, have different edges. There were no rules against using steroids for guys like Bonds, McGwire, Sosa and Canseco. Their numbers can be looked at with a funny face but not completely disputed. The era's offensive production is inflated for obvious reasons but leaving them out of the Hall is ignoring a dark but vital part of baseball history that revived the game from possible demise. Cooperstown is supposed to tell the story of baseball, not leave any parts out. The way I view the Hall is if someone who never watched baseball went there, they could see a little bit of every player that made an impact on the league's history. With this current perspective of picking and choosing people we BELIEVE did not "cheat", we are using selective memory and creating a false perception of what baseball really was. These players were a part of history, like it or not.