Walker got 21.6 percent of the BBWAA vote this year. (Getty Images)

We have moved safely past the vitriol-filled season of Hall of Fame discussions, but many of the popular subjects from December and early January linger. Specifically, where people fall on the matter of performance-enhancing drugs, which guys on the Hall of Fame ballot used and how those guys should be treated. Larry Walker played in the so-called Steroid Era and was on the Hall of Fame ballot, and he now has an article up on SI.com in which he discusses the issue, among other things.

Here's what Walker has to say about PEDs:

Somebody said on the TV that we're all to blame for the fact that we saw PED use going on and nobody said anything. But you didn't see it. If there were teammates of mine doing it, they didn't sit in the middle of the clubhouse and shove a needle in their butt. Maybe they showed up to spring training bigger and stronger -- I witnessed that but at the time I never put two and two together. I'd just think, 'Holy God, you worked your butt off this winter.'

To say that we're all to blame because we didn't go rat one of our teammates? A, I don't recall seeing them doing it. It didn't happen that they would do it right in front of everybody. B, if you are getting called guilty for not saying something, well, otherwise you end up being a Jose Canseco, which a lot of players don't like because he ratted his peers, his teammates, his friends.

Ask anybody who looks at me -- if there was a needle going in my butt, it had pancake batter in it, not steroids. People will always say, "Oh, you played then." Even 20 years from now, it's going to be that way for all of us from that era.

Something I'd never considered before today: People injecting pancake batter into their butts.

On a serious note, Walker has a great point about how the clean players weren't actually first-hand witnesses to what was going on behind closed doors for some players and I personally commend his stance to not be a "rat" even if he did know something.

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