Baseball Hall of Fame has to answer lots of questions

Baseball has put itself in an unenviable position.

Of all the sports played in this country, baseball had the most enviable history. It grew with the country and its highs and lows often corresponded with the mood in the general population.

In W.P. Kinsella's wonderful nook, "Shoeless Joe," which was made into the movie "Field of Dreams," James Earl Jones' character Terrence Mann tells Kevin Costner's Ray Kinsella what baseball means to America.

"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again."



And yes, that's all true. To people who go to the trouble to learn it, the game has wondrous gifts. But for a period of about 20 years, from the mid '80s till about 2005, an enormous number of players were cheating and owners essentially looked the other way.

Most of it was nothing more than poor judgement. Owners didn't trust the balance of the game and some believed that opening up to more offense would attract young fans, especially after the disastrous lockout of 1994-5 that resulted in the cancellation of the World Series for the first time ever.

So when they realized that many of the top power hitters in the game were using anabolic steroids, owners winked and looked the other way.

In the short term, it paid off. Fans loved it in 1998 when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa assaulted and then shattered Roger Maris' single-season home run record. McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sosa 66, the two greatest seasons in baseball history to that point.

In fact, Sosa hit more than 60 home runs in a season three times in four years, and McGwire backed up his 70 home run season with 65 the next year.

Then in 2001, Barry Bonds came out of nowhere and hit 73 home runs. It wasn't as if he wasn't great. Bonds was pretty much considered the best player in baseball for much of his career, but the most home runs he ever hit before or after 2001 was 49.

He was named the National League's Most Valuable Player four consecutive seasons starting in 2001, and when he stopped playing after the 2007 season, he was the all-time home run leader with 762.

But when the dust cleared after the steroid era, when baseball finally began cracking down on abusers, the record book was something of a shambles. Very few fans want to recognize Bonds as the all-time home run leader, or the single-season record holder for that point.

And in the last couple of years, things have become very complicated. Most of the best hitters and pitchers of the steroid era have become eligible for the Hall of Fame. And in 2013, no one was elected. This despite the fact that three players were on the ballot for the first time who without steroids would have been certain winners -- Bonds, catcher Mike Piazza and pitcher Roger Clemens.

The only one not directly connected to the scandal was Piazza, and he had nearly 58 percent of the vote. That's well short of the 75 percent required, although it's far better than Clemens (37 percent) or Bonds (36 percent) and even farther ahead of holdovers McGwire (17 percent) and Sosa (12 percent).

Baseball is still a wonderful game, and when the 2014 voting is announced Wednesday, it's a pretty good bet two pitchers untouched by the steroid era -- Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine -- will be elected, as well as maybe one or two other players.

The Hall is nice, and it's clearly the best of all the various professional sports Halls of Fame. But the questions fans will have are getting more and more common, and more and more great players won't be honored there.

Maybe it can be straightened out someday, but the time will come when visitors will be asking about all the greats who aren't there. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Pete Rose and a host of others.

Lots of questions.