Mike Celizic

A lot of baseball writers didn’t really want to vote to put Rafael Palmeiro into the Hall of Fame, but, given the numbers he’d put up, didn’t see how they could avoid it. Now, they can.

Palmeiro, who sat before a congressional subcommittee five months ago and told lawmakers point-blank, “I have never used steroids. Period,” has been caught using steroids.

We will pause here to allow the reader to fill in his or her own jokes, comments, asides, etc. referring to the other physique-enhancing drug he admits to using, Viagra. Now, if you’re all done snickering, let’s return to the subject.

You don’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin, or even Karnak, to guess what Palmeiro is probably going to say. It will be something about taking a supplement that he bought at a nutrition center, and how was he to know it had steroids in it?  In other words, it was an accident.

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It’s not going to wash, especially for him. Here’s a guy with 3,000 hits and nearly 600 home runs who has never been the best player in his league, a man who has never finished higher than fifth in the MVP balloting. If ever there was an argument that mere numbers shouldn’t be an automatic ticket to Cooperstown, Palmeiro’s career was it.

Still, only three other players had 500 homers and 3,000 hits, and their names were Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Eddie Murray. And when you’re in that company, it’s hard to say you’re not one of the greats.

But if you allow people to suspect you got there with the help of modern chemistry, you’ve got problems. Given a career in which he was always a very good player but rarely a truly great player, that automatic entry into the Hall that people said was his has to be reconsidered.

He can say what he wants about it being an accident, and it won’t matter. Voters are going to go back to his records and notice that he never hit 40 home runs until 1998, his eleventh full season in the big leagues. And then he repeated the feat in four of the next five years, which happened to coincide with the same period in which everyone else was suddenly hitting massive numbers of homers.

You can’t say Barry Bonds doesn’t belong in the Hall, no matter what he did or didn’t take. He was a great ballplayer when he was a skinny kid, and was going there anywhere. But you can say that, had it not been for chemicals, Palmeiro would be a guy with good numbers, but not the great numbers he has.

That may not be fair and it might even be true that he took something without knowing what was in it. Given the cloud of suspicion around the game’s offensive explosion, it hardly matters.

And given that suspicion, how dumb did Palmeiro have to be to take anything about whose contents he wasn’t absolutely sure. There is no reason to be caught even with a supplement that has unannounced additives.

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