Inside Baseball: Palmeiro and Gonzalez clouding Hall of Fame vote

It's the most perplexing time of the year.

A Hall of Fame ballot will soon arrive at my home and I will once again stare at the names of some of the greatest players in baseball history, trying to decide if they are worthy of a trip to Cooperstown, N.Y., that will jack up the price of their signatures and solidify their status as legends.

This has never been an easy task, and many would argue that baseball writers have no business deciding who should and should not be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Players have argued we're not qualified and a lot of sports editors and writers believe newspapers should not be in the business of making decisions that can have pecuniary benefits for the men we covered. Others argue that newspapers should be in the business of reporting news and not making it.

I'm on the fence. On one hand, journalists are trained to be thorough and objective, two qualities that lead to educated decisions about things like who belongs in the Hall of Fame. On the other hand, it is an uncomfortable position to be making the news, especially now that so many of the names on the ballot have artificially enhanced numbers and accomplishments.

Even the first paragraph of the Associated Press' story announcing the names on this year's ballot made me wince because it referred to first-time candidates Rafael Palmeiro and Juan Gonzalez as "suspected steroid users" but made no such reference to Jeff Bagwell.

Palmeiro deserves that label because he failed a drug test 136 days after wagging his finger in front of Congress and saying, "I have never used steroids, period." Gonzalez was never suspended by baseball for steroids, but his name did show up on the 2007 Mitchell Report and in one of Jose Canseco's books.

Bagwell, meanwhile, never tested positive and his name did not show up on the Mitchell Report or in any of Canseco's books. Still, there are people out there who suspected he used steroids, a theory you could offer simply by looking at his cartoonish forearms. Add the fact that he played with admitted steroid users Ken Caminiti and Jason Grimsley and there's at least reason to "suspect" that Bagwell may have used performance-enhancing drugs.