If Barry Bonds isn't a Hall of Famer by the end of the day, it's a failure by the Hall of Fame

At the entrance to the National Baseball Hall of Fame's plaque gallery, a sign hangs to help guide museumgoers through what they're about to see. The first paragraph talks about how players are in the Hall for «their accomplishments in the game.» The next paragraph says other areas of the museum «address the totality of their careers.» The final paragraph ties it all together: «The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's mission is to Preserve History, which is what we seek to do throughout the Museum.»

If indeed that is the Hall's mission, today is nothing less than an abject failure. Barry Bonds, arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history, inarguably worthy of induction, did not reach the 75% threshold in his final year on the writers' ballot. For the past nine years, at least one-third of the baseball writers who adjudicate such matters have found Bonds' use of performance-enhancing drugs to be disqualifying, and the revelation of Tuesday's vote is not expected to render any different judgment. He's not the only one, but Bonds' rejection, in particular, epitomizes how all these decades later, baseball is still bungling the PED issue, valuing a lazy, ahistorical moral referendum over the preservation of history.

It's difficult to pinpoint what's most frustrating. Perhaps it's that there already are players in the Hall accused of using PEDs. Or that the commissioner whose tenure encompassed the entirety of the steroid era, Bud Selig, is himself enshrined. Or that generations of players before Bonds, including manifold Hall of Famers, popped amphetamines as part of their pregame routine. Or that others honored with bronze renderings include multiple racists, domestic abusers and even a player who last year