Wide World of Baseball- A lot of baseball writers didn’t really want to vote to put Rafael Palmiero into the Hall of Fame, but, given the numbers he’d put up, didn’t see how they could avoid it. Now, they can.

Palmiero, who sat before a congressional subcommittee five months ago and told lawmakers point-blank, “I have never used steroids. Period,” has been caught using steroids.

We will pause here to allow the reader to fill in his or her own jokes, comments, asides, etc. referring to the other physique-enhancing drug he admits to using, Viagra. Now, if you’re all done snickering, let’s return to the subject.

You don’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin, or even Karnak, to guess what Palmiero is probably going to say. It will be something about taking a supplement that he bought at a nutrition center, and how was he to know it had steroids in it? In other words, it was an accident.

It’s not going to wash, especially for him. Here’s a guy with 3,000 hits and nearly 600 home runs who has never been the best player in his league, a man who has never finished higher than fifth in the MVP balloting. If ever there was an argument that mere numbers shouldn’t be an automatic ticket to Cooperstown, Palmiero’s career was it.

Still, only three other players had 500 homers and 3,000 hits, and their names were Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Eddie Murray. And when you’re in that company, it’s hard to say you’re not one of the greats.

But if you allow people to suspect you got there with the help of modern chemistry, you’ve got problems. Given a career in which he was always a very good player but rarely a truly great player, that automatic entry into the Hall that people said was his has to be reconsidered.

He can say what he wants about it being an accident, and it won’t matter. Voters are going to go back to his records and notice that he never hit 40 home runs until 1998, his eleventh full season in the big leagues. And then he repeated the feat in four of the next five years, which happened to coincide with the same period in which everyone else was suddenly hitting massive numbers of homers.

You can’t say Barry Bonds doesn’t belong in the Hall, no matter what he did or didn’t take. He was a great ballplayer when he was a skinny kid, and was going there anywhere. But you can say that, had it not been for chemicals, Palmiero would be a guy with good numbers, but not the great numbers he has.

That may not be fair and it might even be true that he took something without knowing what was in it. Given the cloud of suspicion around the game’s offensive explosion, it hardly matters.

And given that suspicion, how dumb did Palmiero have to be to take anything about whose contents he wasn’t absolutely sure. There is no reason to be caught even with a supplement that has unannounced additives.

Every team has a trainer, and every player who is even considering taking a supplement can take it to that trainer and ask if there’s anything to be concerned about. Every team also has a doctor who can provide the same service. And if the trainer and doctor can’t vouch for every last ingredient, down to the inert filler, the player shouldn’t take it.

In the second place, it’s clear now that he was taking something, and the reason he took it was to get bigger and stronger, the better to put up those Hall of Fame numbers and continue to draw a big-league paycheck.

In the third place, if he has been taking supplements now, it’s impossible not to wonder what he was taking a couple of years ago, before baseball concerned itself about how its players were getting muscles that Superman would envy.

This is the problem. It’s why we had the sorry spectacle of congressional hearings and the damning testimony that was leaked from the BALCO grand jury. Players want an edge, and they’ll push whatever limits there are to get it.

Before baseball finally started testing for steroids, there wasn’t anything a fan or critic could say. The drugs may have been illegal, but taking them wasn’t – not as far as baseball was concerned. So you could rant and rave about the records that Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Sammy Sosa and others put up, but the bottom line was, the game didn’t prohibit what they were doing. From baseball’s perspective, using a corked bat was a worse sin than breakfasting on dianobol smoothies.

But those who are disgusted with what went on have been waiting for somebody with big numbers to get caught. And Palmiero, the man who swore to the world he never used steroids, is the man.

Few people, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, have ever done anything dumber. Despite not being an all-time great player, Palmiero had his ticket to Cooperstown already punched. And now, he may have canceled it.