Speaking of: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens' Hall of Fame Snub

One of the biggest conversations in sports over these last few weeks has been Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens getting snubbed yet again in the MLB's Hall of Fame voting despite it being their last year of eligibility on the primary ballot. I understand where the voters are coming from: performance-enhancing drugs are a baseball purist's worst nightmare, and both of these players epitomize the doped-up 90s and early 2000s as well as any. But it still seems pretty unreasonable to keep them out of Cooperstown.

Because let's be honest: using performance-enhancing drugs was just a part of the game in the late 90s and early 2000s. That's not defending it. That's not expressing support for it. But it's the truth of the matter. There was clearly an institutional failure within the MLB to regulate these illicit substances, and if you're the MLB today, at some point you just have to say, "We f-ed up," accept what has already happened, and ensure stricter measures get implemented going forward. It doesn't help at all to continually punish Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens as individuals for what resulted from a wide-spread systematic failure across the league. I hate anything that sounds like cheating, but when the number of players accused of using these substances inches over 100 in that New York Times investigation from way back when, you have to ask yourself whether the main problem is 100 morally deficient baseball players or one morally disengaged league.

You cannot have a baseball "Hall of Fame" without Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, two of the most dominant players of their era. Sure, their dominance was at least in some part due to illegal substances, but using steroids to dominate over other players using equal amounts of steroids still makes you a pretty impressive athlete. We can't just scrub this period from baseball history. After all, baseball in the late 90s and early 2000s was pretty great...