Mike Celizic

There wasn’t even room to speculate about whether Mark McGwire would be a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 2007 that was announced Tuesday. He’s not getting in, not this year — and possibly not ever.

I had thought that he’d be boycotted this year by writers who wanted to take a stand against steroids that they didn’t take eight years ago when McGwire was breaking Roger Maris’ single-season home run record. But I also thought that they’d come around next year or the year after and elect him for the same reason that they elect anyone else: he was the most dominant player at his position in his era.

But recent informal polls of more than 100 voters — about 20 percent of the total — suggest that they intend never to vote for McGwire. I understand the idea of not voting for him this year. Baseball writers are famous for not voting for people in their first year of eligibility; no player, not Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams or Cy Young has ever been elected unanimously, and no one ever will. So not voting for McGwire this year isn’t surprising.

But never voting for him is the worst kind of revisionist thinking. McGwire did what he did according to the rules at the time he played. Baseball didn’t object to steroids; the game didn’t even mention that they could be a problem. Writers who had good reason to suspect that players were enhancing their stats through chemistry said little about it. The players were happy to be hitting all those home runs. The fans were delighted to pay good money to watch the show.

Home runs were good, and it didn’t matter what you did to hit them. Baseball ignored the many signs that steroids were part of the home-run explosion, but it also did a lot to help things along.

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The strike zone was miniscule and parks were growing smaller and more homer-friendly. From the mid-1990s, pitchers started complaining to anyone who’d listen that the baseballs themselves were wound tighter — and were flying farther — than they ever had before, and recently a Cleveland company claimed that scans of 1998 baseballs, including McGwire’s 70th home-run ball, show that they were constructed differently to make them more lively.

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At the same time, the game started throwing out of play any ball that so much as touched the dirt; the scuff ball and cut ball were taken out of the pitchers’ arsenals, depriving them of an opportunity to cheat against the rules of the game even as batters were juicing up and cheating against the moral code of competition.

The circumstances were the same for everyone, and the explosion of home runs was no more an abomination to the game than was the miniaturization of earned run averages the game engineered in the mid-1960s or the unprecedented deluge of hits it created in the 1930s.

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