Big Mac doesn't get mark on Hall ballot

Guy embezzles thousands of dollars from his company. Upstanding member of the community. Donates to charity. Hero to little kids. His life is one long ticker-tape parade of attaboys, promotions and company parties. Few have any idea of what the guy's done, and those who do don't want to believe it.

You can't use Gaylord Perry's election to the Hall to justify voting for Mark McGwire. (Getty Images)

Eight years later, his secret life is no longer so secret. Evidence has piled up that he broke the law. Maybe there were multiple co-conspirators driving the getaway car, but the DNA trail leads to our hero.

Because so many years have elapsed, we're just supposed to look the other way and let him slide?

I don't think so. Wouldn't happen elsewhere, and it's not happening with Mark McGwire on my Hall of Fame ballot.

At hand is the ugly moment of controversy, agonizing and icy glares.

And it shouldn't be nearly as difficult a call as some insist on making it.

Don't tell me about the hypocrisy of glamorizing Mac and Sammy eight years ago and then tearing it all down now. We know a lot more now than we did eight years ago. That isn't hypocrisy, despite what simpleton columnists and talk-show screamers say. It's called due diligence. It's called continuing education. Few had even heard of BALCO in 1998, and you can be damned sure that nobody was handing out subpoenas back then.

Don't tell me that anabolic steroids weren't against baseball's rules in '98, so the players all have Get Out Of Jail Free cards from that period. Anabolic steroids were -- and are -- against the federal law. It's not clearly spelled out in baseball's rulebook that the cleanup hitter can't strangle the batboy to death in the dugout, either.

Do you think that needs to be covered in the rules?

McGwire and his fellow Bash (The Integrity of the Game) Brothers have dishonored the sport by dragging it into the worst scandal since the 1919 Black Sox.

They have twisted some of the game's most treasured numbers into an indecipherable maze of voodoo statistics largely devoid of meaning and context.

They have turned on the game's most important natural resource -- Little Leaguers, high schoolers and college players -- to a whole medicine's chest worth of dangerous unnatural resources that can be harmful or, at worse, fatal.

The Hall of Fame asks its voters to judge "based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."