Next week, the CBS Sports baseball team will start running through the Hall of Fame cases for each player on the ballot, leading up to the great reveal on Jan. 24. It's bound to be the usual contentious time in the comments sections and on social media.

I know some hate it, but I love it. I think it shows that the Baseball Hall of Fame is the best one there is, because no other Hall inspires so much heated discussion. Nothing gets more heated than discussions on players tied to PEDs, and the biggest lightning rods there are Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. 

On that front, we've already seen some heat from current Hall of Famer Joe Morgan. He wrote a letter to BBWAA voters urging them to keep steroid users out of the Hall. Morgan explicitly said he doesn't speak for every Hall of Famer, but there was a big implication in there that he believed he was speaking for many of them. 

Giants great Willie McCovey would definitely be one of those people Morgan is not speaking for. In fact, McCovey believes that letter was mostly directed at fellow Giants (and Pirates, too) great Bonds, via a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. Among the comments -- read the full story for all McCovey's thoughts, including when he directly addresses Morgan -- are that Bonds not being in the Hall of Fame is a "sin." 

And then there's this on PEDs: 

"Guys took things ever since baseball existed. It may not have been steroids, but guys took things like those greenies and stuff so they could play the next day. You're telling me everybody is clean as a whistle? You played against guys who were doing the same thing he was doing, so what the heck?"  

McCovey correctly drives home three central points that we've been making on this website for years. 

  1. Players have been trying to use PEDs since the beginning of baseball. Research "Pud Galvin" if you want a Hall of Famer as an example. 
  2. "Greenies" are amphetamines, and Hall of Famers such as Willie Stargell and Mike Schmidt have been tied to them. Nowadays, a positive amphetamines test carries a 25-game suspension. 
  3. We don't know who was or was not using any sort of PEDs while Bonds was going through his prime. We have no way of definitively knowing everyone who did or did not. None. Any argument against that is delusional. As such, we are we penalizing Bonds? Because he was the best player alleged to have done it? Hurt feelings? 

We'll get more into Bonds' Herculean Hall of Fame case next month, but for now, we'll let McCovey's perfect outlining of the selective morality and hypocrisy carry the day.