Imrem: Double standard in baseball Hall of Fame vote

The results of baseball's Hall of Fame election will be announced today and once again I am compelled to defend my ballot.

Included were Jeff Bagwell, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Mark McGwire, Mike Piazza, Curt Schilling, John Smoltz and Sammy Sosa.

Noteworthy to many of you is that I keep voting for known or suspected steroids users. To your credit, the number of nasty emails criticizing me, my mother, my heritage, my religion and my breath has decreased, presumably because most of you consider me beyond help.

Still, Ron Gralewski wrote this week: “Just when I thought you were coming to your senses, I read your HOF ballot … Shame on you!”

That was good but nowhere near my all-time favorite from Bob Ory last year: “I have a feeling that you'd be the first one to construct a statue of Dracula outside of a blood bank just to be ironic and controversial.”

Ironic and controversial, huh? And to think I thought I was ruggedly handsome and academically intelligent.

Every year I consider surrendering to readers who insist on providing security around Cooperstown,

However, every year something convinces me to stay the course. This time I was fortified by managers Tony La Russa, Joe Torre and Bobby Cox being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2014.

Baffling was that there was so little public outrage over the ceremony.

Don't take this wrong. All three belong in Cooperstown. In fact, if Whitey Herzog wasn't the best manager of the past 40 or so years, La Russa was.

But hardly anyone protested that La Russa, Torre and Cox managed in the steroid era and benefited from having players who benefited from performance enhancers.

No, for some reason that doesn't seem to bother baseball fans.

La Russa, Torre and Cox are Hall of Famers to the bone. It was a pleasure being around them and witnessing how they managed their teams.

But where is the outrage about these managers getting into what critics might call the Halloid of Fame? Where are the fans who hammer me for voting for PED users? Where are all the indignant baseball purists?

La Russa, Torre and Cox belong in Cooperstown because their records stand and stand out despite the improprieties of some of the players they managed.

The World Series titles they managed to earn haven't been revoked. They don't have an asterisk next to their victory totals. They don't even have much of a stigma attached to them.

Heck, the home runs, strikeouts, MVPs and Cy Youngs that PED users compiled also remain on the books. Maybe they can't be erased from history because enough of us can't erase them from our minds.

We saw them. They happened. The results remain.

The technicality, of course, is that La Russa, Torre and Cox didn't use steroids, while Bonds, McGwire and Sosa did. Sorry, the distinction isn't enough to change my mind.

Managers — along with owners, general managers and baseball in general — had to at least suspect they were participating in the steroids era and didn't object to prospering from it.

Nobody has been able to explain to me why it's all right for players to be punished while everybody else in the game goes unpunished. Like, why is Bud Selig a lock to get into the Hall of Fame even though he was the commissioner of steroids and remained in office until recently at about $20 million annually?

To most, the best way to be a baseball fan is to look at the Hall of Fame as uncomplicated. To me, the only way to vote is to recognize that Cooperstown is a complicated place populated by complicated men submerged in complicated issues.

Steroids comprise one of those issues, and it will persist until all the users and suspected users are elected or ineligible.