Baseball Hall of Fame: Steroids Controversy Changes Voting for Better or Worse?

Let me preface this commentary with a belief of mine: baseball's integrity is very important to me as an avid fan.

So it was with great joy that I saw Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven make the Hall of Fame. Alomar is one of the five best second basemen of all-time, while Blyleven is one of the most underrated pitchers of all-time.

It took Blyleven 14 years of trying to make it to the Hall, and it is more than well-deserved.

"It's been 14 years of praying and waiting," Blyleven said in a conference call, The Associated Press reported. "And thank the Baseball Writers of America for, I'm going to say, finally getting it right."

But let's cut the pleasantries.

Blyleven finally made it to Cooperstown because he had an amazing career, yet he was also voted by writers because of the new moral ethical system being used.

Baseball writers are now more willing to keep out players linked at all to performance enhancers, even if he has gaudy numbers.

Basically, the voters are now doing the policing that Major League Baseball refused to do when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were knocking balls out of the park more frequently than Brett Favre was charged with a form of harassment.

Although I appreciate that this sudden breath of morality which has been infused into baseball, it's not fair to keep players linked to steroids out of the Hall of Fame because the more reports are released, the more convinced I am that about 90 percent of baseball players since 1980 have used some sort of performance enhancer.

Alomar and Blyleven were kept out of the Hall because guys who were juicing more than anyone else were absorbing votes like the very syringes they used to propel their careers and inflate their statistics.

In turn, they were voted in because those tainted careers are now being placed with an unofficial ban to the Hall of Fame.

A true paradox if you ask me.

But these days, an athlete not taking steroids sounds like a paradox as well.