re: Barry Bonds: It would mean a lot to me to make the Baseball Hall of Fame

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Thanks for the info. Based on the figures you've presented, I think we can safely assume that a majority of those 198 writers who were around in 1991 are hypocrites.

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We don't have enough information to conclude that since we don't know who voted for whom, when, and why. You could be right, but we don't know.

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Anyway, check out what Mike Schmidt said in an article from the New York Times about amphetamine and steroid use, keeping in mind that he was inducted into the Hall of fame in 1995.

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I remember reading that. A BBWAA writer who wants to place a moral value on his Hall of Fame vote has a tougher job than it sounds. I myself, if I were a BBWAA writer, would err on not voting in people I've known to have used PED's, but I don't know for sure. I have no problem with a writer voting one way or another. These writers do put serious thought into it, and there are gazillions of them, and if 300 of them vote against you, then I can't honestly go to all 300 of those and tell them that they're wrong for it.

Here's another way to look at it:

BBWAA voters of our generation--ie, voters who began voting after Perry's induction year--comprise of about 75% of all voters. Any one of these voters who refuses to vote for a known PED user into the Hall and stays consistent with that throughout his BBWAA membership timeline is of a fine, straight, acceptable, non-hypocritical conscience. If 1/3 of our generation's voters have this in common with him, then that spells "doom" for anyone who is on the ballot and is known to have used PED's, and if this is so, we can't rightly call the BBWAA as a whole a hypocritical electorate.