<strong><em><u>Ted Green:</strong></em></u> Hard choices on baseball Hall of Famers

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Let’s start with a disclaimer. I think it’s beautiful, even lyrical and poetic looking at it today, that Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs weighing 180 pounds when the only thing he probably took was Tums for his tummy.

Conversely, I think it’s disgusting that Barry Bonds hit several hundred of his 762 bombs loaded up on enough steroids and human growth hormone to bench-press the TransAmerica Building.

Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds do not belong in the same home run conversation.

That said, please spare me all the condemnation and outrage from the pundits who are so dogmatically punitive when it comes to baseball’s gazillion-dollar ethics question: Namely, can anyone who juiced be admitted to the Hall of Fame?

Appalled as we might be that the letters RX became as important to baseball as HR and BA, there’s no way the voters in the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Assn. of America) can randomly say ‘yes’ to some future Cooperstown candidates and a blanket ‘no’ to those whom they know or even suspect of cheating.

Because how do they really know who did and who didn’t? In many cases, how will they ever know?

Mark McGwire admitted to using androstenedione, a testosterone precursor that could be bought off the shelf at that time and is now banned in baseball. He also stonewalled Congress in his 2005 testimony -- and now his own brother, who is a bodybuilder and personal trainer, is calling out the former slugger on his steroid use.

A-Rod got caught and then confessed. Bonds and Clemens got caught red-handed and, along the way, probably lied. But those are the biggest fish, the Moby-Dicks. What about the rest of the trophy fish swimming in the filthy water?

Fact is, I don’t think the Hall of Fame question is quite as simple as saying the heck with them, they cheated.

It’s beyond obvious now that from around 1998 to quite possibly the present day, most everybody in baseball that could hit the ball far did (or are still doing) drugs. You do know, I assume, that HGH is undetectable except by a blood test? And because, as I write this, no players union in any major sport, including baseball, will allow its athletes to undergo blood tests, here’s the cold, hard fact:

Half of baseball could still be using HGH today.

And here’s the most salient point: Baseball itself has tacitly condoned the culture of performance-enhancing drugs. Bud Selig, Gene Orza, Donald Fehr and the owners -- they all knew what was going on, long before the mainstream media caught up to the story years later.

These men entrusted with preserving the integrity of America’s pastime turned the other cheek, knowing that the home run was the best part of the show and, thus, good for business.

In A-Roid’s case, I can make the argument that if you choose to believe he did the drugs for the three years he says he did, 2001-03, you can subtract the 150 or so homers he hit then, and by the time his career is over he might still have 600 or 700, even if you take away the 150.

So doing only what so many others in the game were doing and nothing more, sticking needles in his rear end -- tell me, with those numbers, how is he not a Hall of Famer?

Unfortunately, those quaint and historically important keepers of the flame in Cooperstown are now in the unenviable position of really not being able to honestly, with complete knowledge, admit anyone who played from 1998 on.

To enshrine anyone not knowing for sure whether or not he was using, or to admit a player just because he didn’t get caught or confess, is disingenuous and dishonest.

At this point they either admit everyone who qualifies, drugs or no drugs, and that means Bonds, Clemens, McGwire and A-Rod when his time comes, or they admit no one, maybe not even pitchers, many of whom were juiced too.

Baseball, you see, is caught in the noose of the very rope it wrapped around its own neck. That is the dilemma, the conundrum, the abyss, facing the once Grand Old Game. It’s ugly, it’s sad, and as President Obama himself said today, it’s depressing. But it’s also real life.

Baseball’s Steroid Era: Like herpes or the Internal Revenue Service, it’ll never really go away.

And the questions it continues to raise are even bigger than the stars whose bodies and statistics it inflated.

-- Ted Green

Ted Green used to cover sports for the L.A. Times. He is currently senior sports producer for ‘KTLA Prime News.’