Baseball today is dealing – as it has dealt so often before – with the inevitable consequences of kicking a problem down the road. The problem of steroids in competitive sports is not a new one, and nobody seriously believes that other major sports have wholly solved it; the cat-and-mouse game between leagues and associations testing for drugs and athletes hiding them is a perennial feature of sport. But baseball, almost alone among major professional and amateur sports (in no small part due to the power of its players’ union) spent years in denial about the issue, without anything resembling an enforceable legal structure for finding and punishing users of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

Now, the piper comes for his pay; many of the game’s biggest stars have been named (conclusively or by reasonably well-grounded rumor or accusation) as users, years into or after careers in which they accomplished enough on the field to merit the game’s highest honor – induction in the Hall of Fame. And so the debate is not just about how to clean up today’s and tomorrow’s game and punish future offenders, but how to account for things that have already been accomplished with the aid of drugs.

Baseball’s most perceptive and iconoclastic analyst, Bill James, has finally entered this fray, posting his intended-to-be-definitive take on steroids and the Hall (warning: link opens a PDF). You may or may not agree with it all – I can’t say I agree with everything he says – but as always, James is wise, witty and thinking outside the box. Here’s James in full futurist mode, on why the stigma attached to steroids is likely to fade with advances in technology:

If we look into the future, then, we can reliably foresee a time in which everybody is going to be using steroids or their pharmaceutical descendants. We will learn to control the health risks of these drugs, or we will develop alternatives to them. Once that happens, people will start living to age 200 or 300 or 1,000, and doctors will begin routinely prescribing drugs to help you live to be 200 or 300 or 1,000. If you look into the future 40 or 50 years, I think it is quite likely that every citizen will routinely take anti-aging pills every day.

And here is his take on how the explosion of sex on television illustrates the dynamic that drives the gradual erosion of standards – the same dynamic he foresees ultimately breaking down resistance to inducting steroid users in the Hall:

[T]his happened without the consent and without the approval of most of the American public. It was never true that most people wanted to see more sex on TV. Probably it was generally true that most Americans disliked what they regarded as the erosion of standards of decency. But it was always true that some people wanted to see more sex on TV, and that was all that mattered, because that created a market for shows that pushed the envelope, and thus eroded the barriers. It was like a battle line that disintegrated once the firing started. The importance of holding the battle line, in old-style military conflict, was that once the line was breached, there was no longer an organized point of resistance. Once the consensus against any sexual references on TV was gone, there was no longer any consensus about what the standards should be – thus, a constant moving of the standards.

James also talks about the forgiving nature of history, and goes on to explain that there was never, in practical terms, a real rule against steroids in the game, in any sense that we understand the concepts of rules and law:

It seems to me that, with the passage of time, more people will come to understand that the commissioner’s periodic spasms of self-righteousness do not constitute baseball law. It seems to me that the argument that it is cheating must ultimately collapse under the weight of carrying this great contradiction – that 80% of the players are cheating against the other 20% by violating some “rule” to which they never consented, which was never included in the rule books, and which for which there was no enforcement procedure. History is simply not going to see it that way.

The absence of consent isn’t as big a deal to me as it is to people with more emotional attachment to the players’ union and the collective bargaining process, but James is right that the absence of collective bargaining gave the players good reason to believe there wasn’t really any sort of enforceable rule.

I recommend that you read the whole thing, as excerpts alone cannot do it justice, and James in any dose is always worth reading. My own long-stated view remains that, aside from the extreme Joe Jackson case of people trying to lose ballgames or conspiring with those who do, the Hall should not judge people who got away with things that were fairly widespread to win baseball games – the Hall has always honored the true ethos of professional sports, which is that it ain’t cheating if you don’t get caught. It’s 70-odd years too late to change that.

More fundamentally, the Hall isn’t for the players as much as it is for the fans. A Hall without the likes of Bonds and Clemens (and Pete Rose, for that mattter) ceases to be a Hall worth taking seriously. That doesn’t mean we withhold all moral judgments of the men who entered the Hall by tainted means, but it recognizes that the Hall is more than just a stick with which to punish miscreants; it is the guardian of the game’s history itself, and walking its corridors is the best way to keep the good and the ill alike in that history alive. Put them in, and let the arguments themselves be immortal.

Dan McLaughlin blogs at Baseball Crank.