The Hall of Fame is not for cheaters!

I mean, except...

There are two things that everyone could always agree on about Gaylord Perry: he was cool as shit and he cheated at baseball.

There were rumors during his playing career, of course, because you can’t hide that kind of thing. Perry learned the spitball from a teammate on the Giants, and threw it for a decade, and then wrote a book called Me And The Spitter where he talked about throwing a spitter and how to hide throwing a spitter and how that was all in the past and he’d definitely stopped throwing a spitter.

Gaylord Perry pitched another 10 seasons in the majors after writing the book and folks, he had not actually stopped throwing the spitter.

Perry explicitly cheated during his entire major league career. He learned how to cheat as a rookie, cheated through his whole Giants career, cheated to win a Cy Young with Cleveland in 1972, wrote a book about his cheating, cheated to win a Cy Young with San Diego in 1978, and cheated through the end of his career, with his only ejection for doctoring the ball coming in 1982, his second-to-last season. He went to the Hall of Fame at least partly because of his cheating. It’s at least possible the cheating put him in Cooperstown, made him something more than, I don’t know, Johnny Sain, we’ll say, who was a very good pitcher who’s now mostly remembered for being the rhyming half of a fun saying.

Everyone loves Gaylord Perry. Everyone fucking loves him. They should! I have no objections to that. He lived a good, long life, and gave a lot to the game of baseball, and got a lot from the game in return. It was exactly how it’s supposed to work, and he passed away on Thursday with his legacy completely secure.

On Sunday, Barry Bonds was passed over for the Hall of Fame for the 11th time largely because of his legacy of cheating, for which he is widely hated.

I’d ask what the disconnect is, but we all know the disconnect. It’s that this happened extremely recently, or at least recently enough to be within living memory. People were mad about Bonds when he was playing, and those people are still mad. People were mad at Perry too; Bobby Murcer said then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn didn’t have the guts to enforce the No Spitters rule and got suspended for it. Billy Martin, then manager of the Tigers, claimed he ordered his pitchers to throw a spitter in a game when they faced Perry, and he too got suspended for it.

Even with that, though, Perry never faced the same vituperation that Bonds did. Even though he was making a mockery of the sport’s rules, spitting in the face of everyone who played clean, acting like he deserved advantages that they didn’t get, even still, he kept getting signed to new contracts and he kept getting playing time and the writers voted him into the Hall of Fame on the third ballot.

Sure, he didn’t set the all-time wins record, but Sammy Sosa didn’t set the all-time homer record and he still got shut out. Perry was an all-time great at striking guys out without being the greatest of all time, and meanwhile Rafael Palmeiro was barely even considered for the Hall.

So why is it that steroids are the great evil, the one untouchable, the Thing You Cannot Do unless you’re David Ortiz? Why is it that performance-enhancing drugs, a loose category at the time Bonds and company used them that was flagrantly unenforced, are worse than throwing a spitball, or putting Vaseline or K-Y Jelly on the ball, violations against which there was a specific rule, which is literally nicknamed Gaylord’s Rule?

Here’s my theory: they’re not. People were just told this was the thing to care about and so they care about it.

The entire history of sports is guys trying to gain edges however possible. The Houston Astros had a trash can, and Bonds had Victor Conte, and Perry had Vaseline, and Babe Ruth had sheep testicle extract. Some of these were more effective than others, but they were the same types of men making the same types of decisions. You can ban them and be angry at the low character of the ingrates who would attempt such a thing, but this is the history of baseball.

The Hall of Fame is a museum that putatively exists to honor the history of baseball. They’re doing it with Perry, who if held to today’s standards would be an outcast. They’re doing it with the Astros, whose multiple championships will each have a display in one of the cooler, less famous areas of the museum. And they should do it with Bonds too (and Roger Clemens, but I don’t care about him, which is why he’s gone unmentioned). They belong there. They are essential parts of the story of baseball. Cheating is an essential part of the story of baseball, because baseball players have been cheating for a very long time.

Barry Bonds hit dinger after dinger, and it was fun. He should be honored for that, because that’s what you do with all-time greats. Did he cheat? Sure, but he was also cool as shit, and that’s what really counts.