No
Alex Rodriguez has no place in the Hall-of-Fame.
Bottom line – he cheated.
I do have more respect for A-Rod then say, Barry Bonds, for admitting his mistakes. But that doesn’t make up for what he did.
I have always been taught not to cheat, and if you do cheat, you can’t play anymore.
That’s what happened to Pete Rose, he got banned from baseball.
But steroid users, they’re allowed to keep playing. And they don’t even get penalized for what they did.
Everything he did during the years he admitted to taking steroids should be eliminated from his statistics.
The problem is, he lied once about taking them so how do we know he isn’t lying again? What if he has been on steroids his whole career, what if he is still on them?
To me, the Hall-of-Fame is about more than just how well players played the game, it’s about how they played it and what kind of person they are.
A-Rod no longer meets those standards and doesn’t deserve to be mentioned with the baseball greats.
Alex Mayster
Yes
Without a doubt, Alex Rodriguez has been the best player in baseball over the past 13 years.
In his career, he has hit over .300 nine times (including hitting .358 in Seattle in 1996), has 553 career home runs and even has stolen 293 bases.
With that being said, there is no way he should be kept out of the baseball Hall-of-Fame.
Even if we throw out his 2001-03 steroid years, A-Rod is still going to have a Hall-of-Fame caliber career.
It’s true that in those three years, he hit over 150 home runs, but even if those long balls are discredited by HOF voters, they will more than likely still have 600 clean homers to judge him by.
Up until now, Mark McGwire is the only prominent member of the “steroid era” to have been rejected by the Hall and there are many that say if he didn’t get in, neither should Rodriguez.
However, all apologies or non-apologies aside, the fact is A-Rod is not a one facet player like McGwire, whose career batting average was .253.
He is one of the best all-around ballplayers we’ve ever seen, and that’s what we need to remember him for.
D.J. Piehowski
