Most careers in professional sports end with a whimper, not a bang. Jump shots that once swished through the net bounce off the rim. Passes than once hit receivers with pinpoint precision are intercepted. Pitches that once produced strikeouts are pounded into the cheap seats. When the great ones stay too long, the memory of their final appearance is sad.
But not always.
Williams is in the Hall of Fame. Rivera will join him there in five years. Pettitte, who never had a losing season, probably won’t. His numbers are good enough for the Hall, at least in my opinion, but he used human growth hormone a couple of times (before the rules forbid it) while recovering from elbow surgery, so some zero tolerance sportswriters are already arguing that his use of HGH is a character defect that disqualifies him from the Hall.
There are at least a couple of responses to that. One, of course, is that having a defective character certainly didn’t keep Ty Cobb, at minimum one of the meanest ess-o-bees ever to play the game, and possibly a certifiable psychopath, out of the Hall. The other is that a couple of doses of HGH when it was still legal is the equivalent of a couple of parking tickets compared to the steroid sins of other players; you know their names. A couple of parking tickets can and should be forgiven. Pettitte won 256 games, a total that may never be approached again the way the game is played today. He belongs in the Hall.