No Hall passes here for Clemens, Bonds

Beyond the federal indictment in the case of Barry Bonds and the Mitchell Report testimony in the case of Roger Clemens, beyond even the suggestion by a blogger named Curt Schilling that Clemens should be stripped of his last four Cy Young Awards if he can’t clear his name, there is the distant horizon and the Hall of Fame.

If Bonds and Clemens have been stained so severely now that no team will touch them, guaranteeing they have finally appeared in their last major league games, they will be eligible for election in 2013, having observed the five-year waiting period.

Should these ambassadors of the Steroid Era, alleged to have used performance-enhancing substances over several seasons in their historic careers and who otherwise would win landslide approval on the first ballot, still be elected?

The answer here is no.

The answer here is that the closest they should get to a bronze plaque is the Hall’s ticket window.

Barring new evidence by 2013, reversing what has been presented to this point, the answer here is that they can always join Pete Rose in selling their autographs from a Main Street memorabilia store during induction weekend in Cooperstown.

I am not licking my chops as I write this, not jumping up and down in glee.

Anyone with deep feelings about the game can’t be anything but saddened to consider an industry legacy that excludes Bonds, the all-time home run leader and seven-time winner of the most-valuable-player award, and Clemens, a seven-time winner of the Cy Young Award and tenacious owner of 354 victories, from that Valhalla in upstate New York.

Linked to the industry-dictated exclusion of Rose, the all-time hit leader, it can be argued that the Hall would be devoid of the best pitcher ever and the best power and contact hitters ever -- diminished and renamed a Hall of Not All the Famous.

No one could take joy in that, but the possibility is real.

Eligible members of the Baseball Writers Assn. of America have no vote on Rose. He remains on baseball’s restricted list for gambling on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds and is not likely to come off soon, if ever.

Unless Bonds and Clemens are similarly restricted, the BBWAA electorate will ultimately get its shot at them.

How it plays out is difficult to predict at this point.

However, there may have been a clue in last year’s election when Mark McGwire, the first of the Steroid Era biggies to appear on the ballot, received only 23.5% of the votes, far shy of the required 75%.

McGwire hit 583 home runs to rank eighth on the all-time list, statistics that normally would have resulted in automatic election. He hit a then-record 70 in 1998 while acknowledging use of androstenedione, a testosterone precursor that could be bought off the shelf at that time and is now banned in baseball.

Beyond that admitted use of andro, and the steroids accusations by former teammate Jose Canseco in his recent book, there was nothing documented on McGwire before he refused to testify about the past in the 2005 congressional hearing into steroids in baseball.

That seemed to be an inexplicable stance considering it created the tacit perception he has something to hide and undoubtedly turned some of the Hall electorate against him -- at least on the first ballot.

Whether McGwire moves closer to 75% this year (voters now have the ’08 ballot and must return it by Dec. 31), or in ensuing years, is uncertain, but until he explains his congressional stance, I too will withhold support while less dogmatic about his candidacy than that of Bonds and Clemens.

Bonds has been bisected and dissected, his suspect physical transformation, beginning at 35 in 1999, thoroughly documented in the book “Game of Shadows.” Over the last nine seasons, a career period of normally declining skills, he hit 351 of his 762 home runs, including 73 in 2001.

Some in the media will insist that he should be elected to the Hall on the basis that he was a Hall of Fame player before ‘99, before he “unknowingly” began employing illegal substances, his power and physique expanding exponentially.

While there is truth to the contention that Bonds was on his way to Cooperstown before ‘99, do you dismiss an entire decade as if it wasn’t part of the same career, as if what went into creating it and sustaining it, now underscored by federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, doesn’t matter?

The same question can be posed in regard to Clemens.

Former trainer Brian McNamee is quoted in the Mitchell Report as saying he injected Clemens with illegal substances 16 times during the 1998, 2000 and 2001 seasons. The Rocket, who has denied McNamee’s allegations, won 53 games in those three seasons and was strong enough, at 40-plus, to win another 74 over the next six while continuing to be trained by McNamee at times.

That’s 141 wins, including 14 in 1999, from the time McNamee said he gave Clemens his first injection in ‘98, and reason enough, wrote Schilling on his website, for Clemens to forfeit his final four Cy Youngs if he can’t offer assurance they were cleanly obtained.

That seems a drastic proposal, but it’s a legitimate point.

How much of post-’98 was performance-enhanced?

How much of that are you expected to dismiss if the contention is that Clemens is still Hall of Fame-worthy?

For now, the clock may have begun ticking on the five-year waiting period for two inflated giants of the game.

Whether we have a more complete picture by the time Bonds and Clemens appear on the ballot for the first time is uncertain.

For now, I don’t like the picture and wonder how much it can really change.