Baseball will once again face the "Steroid Era" as superstar players who thrived in the time period are up for Hall of Fame votes in 2013.
Whether it is an easy decision for sportswriters who vote players in, baseball will now have to remember these characters once again as talks will brew every time voting season comes.
Will they ever be forgiven? Will their record book numbers be dropped or forever hang under an asterik?
Scott Miller of CBSSports.com put it simple in an email interview with New York Times writer Tyler Kepner, "The Steroid Era was one of the most shameful chapters in the game's history. It made a mockery out of the record book. It pushed retired legends into the shadows when they should have remained in the spotlight, and it put the spotlight on others who never should have been there."
With that said, then there is no way these guys will get picked into the Hall of Fame unless a new stream of writers are eligible to vote and are more forgiven.
I frankly agree with Miller as I grew up watching these players in the Steroid Era. They simply cheated. As much as I love what Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire did in 1998 with their home run race, they didn't do it the right way.
Of course guys like Sosa, McGwire, Jose Canseco and Barry Bonds will forever be the poster boys of the era. They brought in power and home run numbers never before seen since the great Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron.
Who knows what they would have been had they played the game cleanly, but as many will say and have said before, a good majority of the players were on PEDs and it was something that was a natural part of the sport. However, these are the guys getting pinned since they were the biggest players of the time.
As it stands right now, Craig Biggio looks like the only one of these great players who thrived in the 90's that will get voted in.
He wasn't the biggest and didn't boast home run hitting power, but he racked up 3,060 hits, won four Gold Gloves and had a tremendous talent which was getting on base, whether it was hitting the ball or getting hit by the ball.
Biggio is a player that falls into all of these categories, which is the guideline followed by journalists as they make their hall of fame picks, "Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."
McGwire, Sosa, Piazza and Bonds, not so much.
