Big Mac doesn't get mark on Hall ballot

How do you grade McGwire and his Dark Closet colleagues on the "integrity" and "character" parts of that?

I didn't exactly volunteer for the job of gatekeeper in baseball's era of syringes and chemicals.

But we're here, and just because the players and owners abdicated their responsibility to act in the game's best interest 10 or 15 years ago -- by failing to install anti-steroid measures then, rather than waiting until a couple of years ago -- doesn't mean everybody else should lay down, too.

Bottom line is: It is never too late to do the right thing.

And the right thing here is obvious.

The Hall of Fame never has been a place reserved only for altar boys and Rhodes Scholars.

But neither should it be a safe house for lawless players who spit at baseball history, brush aside the notion of integrity and employ situation ethics to cheat their way up the ladder past Roger Maris, Babe Ruth and, soon enough, Henry Aaron.

And those who bring Hall of Famer and noted spitballer Gaylord Perry into the equation right about now? That's a completely disingenuous comparison, misdemeanor vs. felony. Last time we checked, Vaseline wasn't an illegal substance. Doctoring the baseball, stealing signs ... things that occur on the field, opponents and umpires at least have a fighting chance to catch the perpetrators.

Not so with those who disappear inside of a bathroom stall, or into a dark alley, with the Jose Cansecos of the world, a needle and a bottle of get-rich-quick.

Don't confuse gamesmanship and bending baseball's rules with blatant white-collar crime.

Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were the toasts of the town once, too. Enron was a model company and everyone was making gobs of money.

Then the closet door opened and the skeletons tumbled out.

Do you think Lay and Skilling should have walked when their crimes were revealed simply because those crimes had occurred several years earlier?

The slippery slope here is that we don't have an accurate roll call of who's used and who hasn't over the past decade. What if we withhold votes from some potential Hall of Fame players because we believe they were chemical wizards and yet unknowingly vote other dirty players into Cooperstown?

Inconsistent, yes. But also a risk I'm prepared to take, for a couple of reasons.

First, I'm not willing to throw up my hands and award a free pass to those who either have admitted steroid use or who have been fingered by strong circumstantial evidence simply because ignorance elsewhere might allow others who are guilty to skate into the Hall. That's stupid.

Should we close down the entire court system and refuse to convict anybody simply because we know that while some are being convicted, so many others are out there breaking the law and haven't been caught?

Second, if justice is more equal for some than for others, tough. The players brought this on themselves by refusing to push their union toward doing the right thing years ago. There was a silent majority who had every chance to voice their opinion, tell union leader Don Fehr that they were tired of losing jobs to the cheats and sick of suffering guilt by association.

They didn't.

So if McGwire and certain others connected with steroids fail the Cooperstown entrance exam while somebody else with 'roid-inflated stats sneaks in because nobody knew, well, it will be a shame. It's certainly not my first choice. But some justice is better than none at all.

That we're having this debate at all is based solely on McGwire's 583 home runs -- 33 percent of which are skewed between the suspicious seasons of 1997 and 1999, when he smoked 193 of those dingers.

Remove those, and he's nowhere close to a shoo-in for Cooperstown. Of the 18 first basemen currently in the Hall of Fame, only Harmon Killebrew has a lower career batting average than McGwire's .263, only Frank Chance has fewer hits than McGwire's 1,626 and only Chance, Hank Greenberg and George Kelly have fewer at-bats than McGwire's 6,187.

And we're supposed to grin and look the other way at those beefed-up power numbers?

Sorry. The ballot I mailed back the other day did not contain a check next to the McGwire box, and I don't plan on checking it anytime soon, either.

If his own career was constructed with materials suspicious enough that McGwire continues to refuse to defend it, I don't see why anybody else would venture anywhere near that weak and shaky limb to defend him, either.