Creating a team of snubs from the Baseball Hall of Fame comes with more controversy than other sports. Baseball has always seemed to have an attitude that comes with more standards, a sense of tradition and certain culture about it.
Major League Baseball is the only sport that has kept players out of the Hall of Fame that have otherwise earned spots with their play on the field. Pete Rose and the 1919 White Sox have been kept out for gambling and the steroid ERA has too many players to name. If football kept players out of Canton for Steriods and gambling that would eliminate a sizeable portion of the inductees.
Baseball’s higher standards provide far more controversy for who belongs in the Hall than other sports. Will the Black Sox, Rose and PED users ever get enshrined? Probably not anytime soon.
The Hall of Fame has a double standard. Mike Piazza is being inducted and in 2002 he admitted to the New York Times that he had tried Andro and that players had been using amphetamines for generations. Bob Nightengale of USA Today talked about how players that used PEDs are being punished but not those that used Amphetamines.
"Piazza has said he briefly used androstenedione early in his career, stopping when he did not see a drastic change in his muscle mass. He said he had never used steroids because ”I hit the ball as far in high school as I do now.” ”If being big and strong is a prerequisite to hitting 70 home runs,” Piazza said, ”you’d have every Mr. Olympian contestant coming out because God knows there’s no money in body building, at least not the money we make.” Piazza said the use of another drug, amphetamines, has been ”going on for decades” in the majors."
An entire book could be written about what the code of conduct should be and who belongs in the Hall. Players in the distant past were known to be racists and womanizers and the use of the amphetamines (AKA Greenies).
Author H.A. Goodman had an excellent piece on Huffington Post about Steriods and baseball.
For the purposes of this list, these are players that belong in Hall of Fame by position with regards to on-field performance.
Next: Catcher