Roger Clemens and Cooperstown: A 21st Century Solution
Now that Roger Clemens has been indicted for perjury, the question baseball columnists and sports talk shows will beat to death is whether, if he is convicted, his alleged steroid use should keep him out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
He certainly would be there otherwise with 354 career wins and this is the identical issue that will face Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, who both hit over 600 career home runs.
To spare all the blather and moralizing, there is a solution that will end the controversy once and for all. But it requires updating the Hall of Fame for the 21st Century along the lines of another familiar American tourist attraction - Elvis Presley’s mansion, Graceland.
Graceland was created so visitors could appreciate the different facets of Elvis’s life and, as one Graceland Website suggests, "find their own inner Elvis." Fans are invited to find that inner Elvis by visiting his favorite rooms in the mansion, rooms he created according to his different moods.
Depending on your tastes, you can spend time at a meditation chapel to reflect on the King’s greatness, a trophy room to see his gold records, a television room to see where he blasted out a TV featuring rival singer Robert Goulet and the ever-popular jungle room, lined from floor to ceiling with green shag carpeting, designed for who knows what.
The simple beauty of this plan should be the template for the new, improved Baseball Hall of Fame. In order to appeal to visitors’ different interests, the Hall should create special wings reflecting players’ behavior in the manner of Elvis’s mood rooms. Current Hall members would be reassigned, and new members admitted, to sections that would feature a Steroid Wing, a Gamblers’ Wing, an Excessive Eating/Binge Drinking Wing, A Cheaters’ Wing and a Straight Arrow Wing.
The Steroid Wing would consist of two rooms, the first for proven steroid users with those stars caught in the current baseball drug investigation and Rafael Palmeiro (569 career homers) as charter members. Clemens makes this room if convicted. This room would serve as a natural cross promotion for other steroid enhanced sports including professional football, track and field, the Tour De France and World Wrestling Entertainment.
The second room of the Steroid Wing would be for "use strongly suspected, but never proven" and have as its charter members Bonds and Sosa. Visitors to this room would receive a headset, courtesy of the Major League Players’ Union, where they could listen to ACLU lectures on the unreasonable search and seizure section of the 4th Amendment and the self-incrimination clause of the 5th Amendment. This is the alternative room for Clemens if he beats the rap.
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