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Baseball has finally reached a point where its fans - and ownership/management figures - no longer place so much importance on statistics as they have in the past. Call it an inevitable fallout from the era of chemical bloat, but a saturation point would have been reached with or without the lid being blown off on steroids. You can only consider so many 50 home run hitters in a single season before it kind of starts seeming not so impressive.

I was thinking this about Rafael Palmeiro a few years ago, actually, in the months leading up to his 3000th hit, before there was even a whiff of scandal concerning him. At the time, he was also sailing past a number of legendary names on the career home run list, and basically, I was looking at him and saying, big deal. He passes Reggie Jackson, but whereas Reggie completely dominated the game of baseball for a good fifteen years offensively, what could you really say at the end of the day about Rafael Palmeiro? What kind of memories of him do you have? Fans and managers are so unimpressed, in fact, he's never voted into an All-Star game, and is only named as a reserve something like twice. In other words, there were four or five guys at his position alone in the American League every year doing the same thing, or better.
Those big numbers like 755, 714, and 660 will simply never be replaced regardless of the actual number of home runs any of these steriod era sluggers end up with. No one will ultimately remember the exact number of home runs Sosa, McGwire, Palmeiro, or even likely Bonds wound up with. So what it boils down to, then, is what it really should have been all along, before baseball developed such a fixation with stats: was this player the best of his era at whatever it was he did, for a significant chunk of time?
As it currently stands, the best sluggers from the period from about 1994 to 2004 were, in no particular order, Bonds, Griffey, Sosa, Thomas, McGwire, Ramirez, Sheffield, Thome and Palmeiro. I say currently because even though those years are in the books, we still don't know everything, as the ongoing investigation into Bonds and some of the others drags forever onward. But if the vote went down today, six of those names are making the hall and two of them are not.
In this country, we abide by an innocent until proven guilty creed across the board. Whatever our suspicions concerning them, they haven't been found culpable of anything more serious than Sosa's corked bat,

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