Squeaky Clean: 11 Players We Want to Believe Never Did PEDs

Only a few weeks ago, Alex Rodriguez was the Great Clean Hope as Dave Studeman of The Hardball Times put it. Now, he's just another tarnished slugger in an ever-growing line of them from the 1990s and early 2000s.

We can debate Rodriguez's legacy, the legitimacy of his statistics, his chances of getting into Cooperstown and the solvency of his story until we are blue in the face. But most of the baseball world (not necessarily members of the mainstream sports media) seem ready to move on to something else. That's never going to happen, though, until the tide of superstar names linked to performance-enhancing drugs ebbs.

So with that in the mind, the MLB FanHouse crew came up with a list of 11 players we want to believe were clean in a time where a significant portion of the players in the baseball world were not. If you want to look at it another way, it's the 11 names that would be most damaging from here on out if we found out that they were using performance-enhancing drugs. Check out the gallery below to find out who these 11 guys are.

Guys We Need to Be Clean

Greg Maddux: "The winningest pitcher of the last half of the 20th century, Maddux has always personified the baseball everyman. He didn't have dominant stuff. He had horn-rimmed glasses, impeccable control, and a gameplan that was two steps ahead of every hitter. He was in almost every way the anti-steroid player. If he juiced, well, who didn't?" -- Pat Lackey

Timothy A. Clary, AFP/Getty Images

Derek Jeter: "Jeter is as visible as any player in baseball. He's the Yankee captain, which makes him a spiritual heir to players like Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mattingly as a humble player who did things the 'right' way. If he was on steroids, it would destroy the idea that the problem was isolated in any way." -- Josh Alper

Al Bello, Getty Images

Ken Griffey Jr.: "He is the anti-Bonds, the anti-Mac and we all attribute his success to natural talent and his failure to freak injuries. To find out that he used steroids would not only completely devalue my entire '89 Upper Deck collection, but roughly 30 years of baseball memories." -- Will Brinson

Eliot J. Schecter, Getty Images

Cal Ripken Jr.: "Ripken is a baseball ambassador. He played the game for 20 years. He holds an untouchable record for the most consecutive games. His farewell tour is one of the truly untainted baseball memories that most purists have over the past 20 years. The thought of the Iron Man cheating would put a more tainted asterisk hex on the sport's history than Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens could ever manage." -- Will Brinson

Brian Bahr, Getty Images

Albert Pujols: "I get the vibe that a lot of people already suspect Pujols, but now that A-Rod is tainted, he's basically the lone beacon of hope." -- Matt Watson

Doug Benc, Getty Images

Mariano Rivera: "Of all the easily hateable things about the New York Yankees, Rivera, oddly, isn't one of them. He's a cold-blooded killer, a stone cold assassin, and despite his old age, he continues to dominate. He's a lock for Cooperstown and his efficiency as a closer, and as one of the greatest postseason players of all-time, makes him revered across baseball." -- Will Brinson

Jeff Haynes, AFP/Getty Images

Frank Thomas: "As the only player named in the Mitchell Report whose sole mention was just to point out how helpful he was in George Mitchell's investigation, finding out that the Big Hurt was on steroids would tear apart the notion that anybody was clean." -- Tom Fornelli

Jonathan Daniel, Getty Images

David Ortiz: "The Red Sox ending their nearly century-long title drought was the biggest non-steroid baseball story of the decade, and Big Papi was its central figure. If we found out he did steroids, it would ruin that too." -- Andrew Johnson

Doug Pensinger, Getty Images

Evan Longoria and Tim Lincecum: "As each superstar is unmasked from a time when there were essentially no rules, it becomes easier for us to write off the entire era or to just accept it for what it is. No, Longoria and Lincecum don't carry the same gravitas as the others on the list, but they're arguably more important to the quest of demonstrating that the game is now clean." -- Andrew Johnson

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Pedro Martinez: "Pedro was arguably the most dominant pitcher baseball has ever seen in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and part of what makes that so special is that he blew away juiced up slugger after juiced up slugger during that stretch. (See: 1999 All-Star Game). It'd be awfully sad for those memories to be tarnished." -- Andrew Johnson

Stephen Jaffe, AFP/Getty Images