FanHouse Mlb Hall Of Fame

OAKLAND -- The Oakland Athletics invited the members of their 1989 World Series championship team back for a reunion on Tuesday, and a couple players were conspicuous in their absence: Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.

Canseco, who was otherwise occupied (see right), was hardly missed.

A day after Carney Lansford said he was still upset at Canseco for writing a tell-all book, Dave Stewart said the A's distaste for Canseco started long before that.

"This book had nothing to do with it, he was a bad teammate," Stewart said.

In my continuing crusade to knock Americans -- particularly my Hall-of-Fame-voting colleagues -- off their moral high horses when it comes to steroids, I wanted to point out an op-ed piece that ran over the weekend in the New York Times.

Zev Chafets, author of an upcoming book about the Hall of Fame, reminds us that baseball players have been using performance-enhancing drugs for a long time.

When the Atlanta Braves suddenly released two-time Cy Young Award winner Tom Glavine earlier this month shock waves were felt throughout the baseball community. It doesn't matter which side of the "were the Braves right or wrong with how they handled this move" fence you sit, what matters now is the fact that Glavine says that he isn't going to pitch again.

At least not in 2009.

In a text message conversation with FOX 5 Atlanta's Buck Lanford, Glavine said, "I'm not going to pitch or do anything in baseball until at least next year."

People, people, people. How many times do we need to go over this? It seems that every time we have another steroids revelation and talk turns to how that affects the player's Hall of Fame qualifications, all of the Pete Rose people come out of the woodwork to say that Pete should get in if the Steroids Guys are in.

A whole batch of them came out in the comments for this post about Sammy Sosa's Hall of Fame chances.

What many people fail to realize is that the rule Rose broke is more important to baseball than any rule about steroid use.

After you got over the "utter shock" of learning that Sammy Sosa had reportedly tested positive for peformance-enhancing drugs, you might have been tempted to think: "Well, there goes his Hall of Fame chances."

This Hall of Fame voter is here to say: Not so fast.

Without getting into all of the details of my well-chronicled position that I'm going to vote based on performance, regardless of alleged or proven steroid use, I'd simply like to remind people that a lot of things can change with time.

The first time the name Sammy Sosa will appear on a Hall of Fame ballot will be December 2012. Provided he gets at least 5 percent of the vote each year, his name will stay on there until 2027. That's a long time.

It happens. Guys such as Tom Glavine spend much of their baseball careers shining brighter than the sun. Then, when nearly everything surrounding their stardom begins to dim near the end, they just won't leave.

They don't want anybody to push them, either.

Hank Aaron wasn't one of those guys.

"Believe me, I was ready to retire, and the game went on, just like it did after Babe Ruth retired and when Willie Mays retired, and it's going to continue that way whether folks realize it or not," said Aaron, 75, baseball's legitimate home-run king, chuckling during an exclusive interview with FanHouse. He has spent the last three decades or so as an Atlanta Braves executive, a noted philanthropist through his Chasing the Dream Foundation and an eternal straight-shooter on all sorts of things.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Even though Randy Johnson was the one who was pitching, catcher Dave Valle still woke up the next day with a sore left shoulder.

Valle, the Mariners' primary catcher in the early '90s, was the man who had to handle Johnson when he was more Wild Thing than Big Unit.

"The fastball would soar up and away (to righties) and if you'd catch it at the wrong angle, it would feel like your arm is going to be pulled out of the socket," Valle told FanHouse. "Then he'd throw that slider down at the back foot. So that was a lot of territory to cover for a catcher ...

"He was a rough day at the office for a catcher. He was throwing 100 mph and didn't have a real good idea where it was going."

Just try to leave him out. Sammy Sosa dares you.

He is retiring from baseball -- was he still here? -- and he says he's just going to "calmly wait for my induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Don't I have the numbers to be inducted?"

Well, of course he has the numbers. Everyone knows that. But this one is going to be interesting because not one person believes he did it clean, without steroids.

Yet not one has actually made an accusation. It's just one of those things you think you know.

Once one of the most beloved sports figures in Chicago, Sammy Sosa, will quietly announce his official retirement from baseball sometime in the near future. He was de facto retired anyway, having not played since 2007 and seeing minimal major league interest in his current services. This move simply means he'll quit trying to find work.

Sosa retires with numbers that would have made him a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer in any previous or probably future generation. With players who excelled between the early 1990s and 2004, however, there is an obvious cloud of performance-enhancing drug suspicion hanging over them. On that subject, he just doesn't want to talk about it.

Tuesday at a luncheon on the Baltimore area, Orioles Hall of Fame third basemen Brooks Robinson revealed that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. According to the 71-year-old Robinson, the cancer was detected very early and he's now in the clear.

After a whopping 39 radiation treatments, the best defensive third baseman in baseball history disposed of the cancer the way he took care of any line drive in his vicinity -- with seeming and unbelievable ease. He told his conquering tale to a group of American Cancer Society members.