Who belongs in the Hall of Fame?

Major league Baseball’s All-Star game will be played tonight at Comerica Park in Detroit. It’s a time to consider the very best baseball has to offer, a proving ground for future Hall of Famers.

But this year’s game, coming just months after congressional hearings on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, is also a time to consider how the concepts of “All-Star” and “Hall of Fame” should be applied to the Era of Steroids.

The key to baseball immortality -- induction into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. -- rests with the members of the Baseball Writers Assn. of America. It’s a group conflicted about the records and record-makers of the last decade, but leaning toward eventual forgiveness.

Jeff Horrigan of the Boston Herald, for instance, defends Mark McGwire’s career -- and the magical year 1998 when he hit 70 home runs -- more than McGwire did under oath in Washington.

“There were no rules,” Horrigan says about the years 1995 to 2002, when 50-home-run seasons were commonplace, the fear of a steroids scandal paralyzed baseball’s leadership, and the game was left with a canyon-sized credibility gap. “Players are like children. They push everything as far as they can until someone stops them.... I blame the era. I don’t blame the man.”

Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell said anyone who used steroids before 2003 broke no baseball rules on the matter for the simple reason that there were none. Boswell adds that it is virtually impossible to measure legitimate achievement from the illegitimate in these years.

Henry Schulman, a San Francisco Chronicle writer who, like Boswell and Horrigan, has a Hall vote, says Barry Bonds -- who hit 73 home runs in 2001 and admitted using illegal steroids, though unwittingly -- deserves enshrinement because the Hall of Fame is full of racists, felons and other scoundrels. Bonds wouldn’t be the worst offender.

Though the writers may be leaning toward forgiveness, there is a chorus of disagreement from men with no vote but perhaps a better claim on passing judgment: Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson and Jim Bunning. These Hall of Famers -- and others -- have lived to see their achievements erased by a decade of drugs and denial. They believe in hard justice.

Last week, Robinson -- whose 586 home runs put him fourth on the all-time list for nearly 30 years before being surpassed by Bonds in 2002 -- said any player found to have been using anabolic steroids should have his name wiped from the record books. No asterisk, no qualifications. During the congressional hearings, Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher and now a senator from Kentucky, said the same. Jackson agreed in an interview with me. He hit 563 home runs, sixth on the all-time list until 2001. He is now 10th.

Aaron, the home-run king whose record is threatened by Bonds, has said nothing publicly, but sources close to him say he wants nothing to do with any ceremony should Bonds break his record. Sources say Commissioner Bud Selig has been in communication with Aaron, hoping he’ll reconsider.

In fact, what each of these legends has in common is their tacit challenge of Selig. The commissioner believes that the years 1995 to 2004 were a renaissance for baseball. He began to take a strong stance on steroids only after being forced by an angry Congress and the revelations of the BALCO case in the San Francisco Bay Area.

For the legends, that wasn’t good enough. To them, baseball knew what was happening and did nothing about it. In 1999, a year after McGwire admitted to using something called androstenedione, baseball and its players association received the results of a jointly funded study that concluded that androstenedione was a steroid. But the league did not ban the substance for five more years.

In December 2000, Selig met with the top doctors from about a dozen teams. Each told him steroids were the most significant threat to the game’s integrity. But Major League Baseball did not adopt a steroid policy for two more years.

In December 2001, the commissioner’s office received the results of its minor-league steroid testing policy. Nearly 450 of 2,000 players tested positive in that season. Selig kept the information private for three years. In addition, between 1998 and 2004, McGwire, Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Terrmel Sledge and Derrick Turnbow all admitted using steroids or steroid-like substances, but baseball did not fine, suspend or reprimand any of them.

In the years to come, it will be the Hall of Fame voters who decide if any of these players will become the enduring All-Stars. But their votes will be subject to another verdict -- from the very men who made the game great.