Skip to main content

The National Baseball Hall of Fame will announce its newest entrants on Wednesday afternoon.

Since many of the sportswriters who vote on this thing can't keep a secret, we already know that Ken Griffey Jr. has made it. He's on every one of the roughly one-third of eligible ballots that have already been published.

Griffey has three things going for him – unassailable statistics, a sweet disposition and a body that didn't markedly change throughout his career, which coincided with the steroid era. He's a safe choice for both the nerds and the moralizers. There is a heavy tilt toward the latter among the ranks of the Baseball Writers of America.

(I'm a BBWAA member, but I don't have a Hall of Fame vote. And though I suppose I could, I don't ever plan on exercising one.)

The mystery of the afternoon will be whether or not Mike Piazza makes the Hall. The best-hitting catcher of all time is currently named on nearly 90 per cent of public ballots. Prospective inductees require 75 per cent of the total vote.

Piazza represents a conceptual bridge between voters and the Hall. He wasn't officially implicated in the steroid era, but a lot of people talked about it. He was a draft afterthought, chosen 1,390th by the Los Angeles Dodgers, and only because his father was friendly with manager Tommy Lasorda. Piazza got big as a pro. I'm speaking spatially as well as conceptually. In his early 30s, he looked like a marble plinth with a goatee. No catcher ever hit more home runs.

Piazza claimed he'd never done banned drugs, but as soon as baseball introduced its testing regime in the early aughties, his power numbers fell off a cliff. Like many of the names we now think of as thoroughly disgraced, he was never tagged in a public drug test. Rumours trailed him like tin cans. Still, he retired in 2007 with his reputation intact.

Did Piazza do PEDs?

You can divide the sporting world into two broad types of people – those who care and those who don't. I'm one of the latter.

What is the difference between the steroid stanozolol, which may make you better at baseball, and Tommy John surgery, which will definitely make you better? Materially, nothing. They're both artificial boosts to performance. Only one is illegal.

If Piazza did drugs, I assume he was one of many. He was still better at his position than any player of his generation. Comparing those relative apples (rather than the oranges of Johnny Bench's era or Yogi Berra's era and so on), Piazza deserves a place in the Hall whether or not he was crooked.

Apparently, a majority of voters either agree with that premise or have spent a lot of time wondering how they too might balloon up to the size of Mr. Olympia by doing pregame stretching and spending a lot of time in an ice bath.

Since we (i.e. I) are in a generous mood, how are Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens doing? Oh. Not so well.

Both men – the best hitter of his time; and one of the 10 or 15 best pitchers – are still on the outs. They're polling around 50 per cent on public ballots, which tend to be more permissive than the private ones.

Though neither ever served a drug suspension – meaning neither was caught by baseball in any official capacity – they won't make the Hall.

Though both were better players, Bonds and Clemens possess only one-third of the Griffey qualification troika – the stats.

Both were so dirtied up by PED accusations and their own pointless contortions trying to wade through them, no PR fire hose is powerful enough to clean their reputations. If either one had put his hand up and said, "Yup. I did it. Sorry," they'd be heroes of truth and redemption by now.

Also, both were notorious jerks to the press, among others. I dealt with Bonds only once, and remember that as one of the most unpleasant interactions of my professional life. Never think that payback isn't just as big a part of this process as separating the great from the very good.

Nonetheless, for as long as either man remains on the outs, the Hall of Fame is lessened. The root attraction of sport is its relentless tilt toward meritocracy. Our games are constantly tugging the rest of society in that direction.

Regardless of who you are or where you come from, if you can throw/hit the ball, you will succeed. To bar two of the best hitters and throwers of the ball in history for crimes never uncovered within the bureaucratic boundaries of baseball is allowing the relativism of the rest of the world to creep into the process. It's anti-meritocratic.

In time, fans will come to think of Bonds and Clemens as they now think of Shoeless Joe Jackson – as legends and ne'er-do-wells, with the two traits intertwined and mutually supporting. After enough time has passed, everyone loves a knave.

Jackson isn't in the Hall. If anything in sport can be called a travesty (Ed. Note: it can't), this is one example. Nobody sensible will care any more that Jackson took money (maybe) to help fix a World Series. They should care that he has the third-highest career batting average in history. Remember what we're judging here – ability rather than law-abidingness.

The Bonds and Clemens crimes – if they're that – don't rise anywhere near Jackson's. They've broken none of baseball's rules. Not that baseball ever proved, at least. But the BBWAA is doing the league's own dirty work, enforcing a de facto lifetime suspension. One hopes the tide of history is pushing in the other direction quickly enough.

Bonds and Clemens won't make it this year, but it must happen eventually. If not, better to rename it the Hall of Famous Players We Liked.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe