The burden of history falls upon baseball like perhaps no other sport in North America. The idealism, desire for moral purity and poetic meanderings of some of the game’s most zealous gatekeepers (most of them self-identified, rather than actual) has hardly diminished after more than a century.

This absolutism has at times been a disservice to the game, because it tends to whitewash or distort history. While historical interpretation is a largely subjective endeavor, the burden of placing the accomplishments of its greatest players in a proper, fair and accurate historical context has become an increasingly troublesome one.

This was the dilemma faced by many writers given Baseball Hall of Fame ballots last year. The results were announced yesterday, and for the first time since 1996, the members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who voted approved no living players for induction.

The lengthy list of names on the ballot made it difficult enough for any player to reach the threshold of being voted on 75 percent of the ballots cast. That some of those names have been associated with steroids use has ushered in what is considered a “new” era on the matter of reaching Cooperstown.

I would agree with that argument, up to a point. This was the first year of eligibility for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the players most hounded by the federal government for doping allegations. We’re not many years removed from the absurdity of Jeff Novitzky, an anti-steroids IRS agent, sifting through a dumpster at the BALCO lab, and the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted to prosecute Bonds and trot Clemens before Congress to get them to confess to their “crimes.”

A number of writers have explained why for them even being connected to or suspected of steroids use crosses the line of “Rule 5,” the Hall of Fame voting provision that goes to a player’s character.

Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, as prominent a steroids scold as there is in the media and author of the 2005 book, “Juicing the Game,” wrote Wednesday that he sent in a blank ballot “because the damages to the game were real:”

I understand that we live in a pharmacological age. There is a pill for everything, whether it is Viagra, Lipitor or Adderall. I understand that we will never get clarity about who used and who didn’t or about how much drugs helped the numbers or hurt them. What will always baffle me, however, is that even in an age of intense cynicism, the lying and deceit don’t matter to some. Why are people who were offended by these years of dishonesty being cast now as outdated charlatans, soapbox preachers or the “moral police”? I wonder why there is so little outrage toward the liars and cheaters who for years used their clout with the fans, their enormous wealth, their fame and their influence in the game to deceive the public.

While I don’t doubt the sincerity of his feelings, the historical holes in his column are vast. First of all, anyone who routinely uses the word “cheaters” in this discussion tends to be an absolutist in expressing an intolerance for steroids. The same goes for “lying and deceit.” This verbiage is commonly employed by writers engaging in far too much schadenfreude regarding Lance Armstrong, for example.

After taking a beating from commenters on the column, Bryant poorly defended himself on Twitter Thursday with about the most arrogant thing I’ve ever seen from a sportswriter (and that’s saying a lot):

BBWAA is nothing but a mop.MLB, players sit back as HOF voters get pummeled for their mess. They punted Steroid Era to us+this is the price

Unlike those now turning their wrath against Armstrong and (alleged) baseball dopers after years of looking the other way, Bryant can’t be accused of being inconsistent about steroids. But he is terribly remiss in ignoring the fact that Cooperstown includes a rogues’ gallery of less-than-earnest human beings who cheated their way through life, if not necessarily on the diamond.

In Thursday’s SB Nation Longform feature, the father-son tandem of Michael and Colin MacDonald contend that absolutists waxing indignant now — and Bob Costas is singled out here — have no one but themselves to blame:

We do not think that steroid use is good or laudable. We wish the game were free from them. We wish steroids never had been used in baseball. But we also recognize reality. When the genie escaped the bottle, it forced players to choose between using and gaining a competitive advantage, and not using and suffering a competitive disadvantage. Using also endangers the player’s health and imposes the same choice on other players. Not using risks losing games and jobs (and the 1989 World Series). Some players will cheat at every opportunity and others will honor all rules no matter the temptation. But many players will play within the rules as the guardians of the game define and enforce them. But if the enforcement of the rules signals a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, the blame originates with those sending the signal.

Prior to the publication of his 2009 book, “Cooperstown Confidential,” author Zev Chafets answered the absolutists as forthrightly as anyone ever has, pointing out the many unhealthy commodities consumed by players, Hall of Famers and otherwise, during the long history of the game:

Since the dawn of baseball, players have used whatever substances they believed would help them perform better, heal faster or relax during a long and stressful season. As far back as 1889, the pitcher Pud Galvin ingested monkey testosterone. During Prohibition, Grover Cleveland Alexander, also a pitcher, calmed his nerves with federally banned alcohol, and no less an expert than Bill Veeck, who owned several major-league teams, said that Alexander was a better pitcher drunk than sober.

In 1961, during his home run race with Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle developed a sudden abscess that kept him on the bench. It came from an infected needle used by Max Jacobson, a quack who injected Mantle with a home-brew containing steroids and speed. In his autobiography, Hank Aaron admitted once taking an amphetamine tablet during a game. The Pirates’ John Milner testified at a drug dealer’s trial that his teammate, Willie Mays, kept “red juice,” a liquid form of speed, in his locker. (Mays denied it.) After he retired, Sandy Koufax admitted the he was often “half high” on the mound from the drugs he took for his ailing left arm.

These arguments are gaining more traction in the mainstream media, including with some Hall of Fame voters, who are responding forcefully to the puritans. Another early chronicler of steroids in baseball, Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, wrote this week why he won’t cross the same line as Bryant. So some voters who couldn’t check off Bonds or Clemens also excluded Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza by extension, which riled up Richard Justice of MLB.com:

Oh, Lord, scoop out my eyes with a plastic spoon. There are few things sportswriters enjoy more than preaching about right and wrong.

Ditto for baseball business writer Maury Brown, who doesn’t have a Hall of Fame vote but ought to:

People are not all “rainbows and unicorns.”…. Cheating in baseball began long before steroids were the lightening rod they are today… The HOF isn’t Church, so don’t vote like it is…. Those that are not filling out their ballots as a form of protest are weak, making the story about them, and need to get in the trenches, deal with it or step aside. Your vote is a privilege, not a right. Deal with the complexities of it all.

(Similarly smart views here from Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kevin Modesti of the Pasadena Star-News and Jayson Stark of ESPN.com.)

As the Hall of Fame votes were being finalized, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns anointed himself as Savonarola of Swat in rather churlish comments to the Hollywood Reporter that have ricocheted around the sports media world:

We know some pitchers extended their playing careers, we know some people hit the ball farther, but nobody hit .406, nobody had a 56-game hitting streak, no pitcher won 30 games, no pitcher won 35 games, no pitcher won 25 games. Maybe that helps you make it less onerous, but at the same time, those motherf—ers should suffer for a while.

Burns — who gave Costas, Bryant and Verducci unquestioned face time about steroids in his “Baseball” film — is among the last of the baseball Romantics, and it is a sad state of affairs. There’s a sense of desperation, if not moral outrage to their rhetoric, rife with the notion that the game’s robber barons of today aren’t owners who purloin public money for their playhouses but pumped-up sluggers who give fans the long ball they constantly crave.

But to denounce the absolutism of the Romantics is not to endorse the use of steroids, or to say that they are a good thing. It is to acknowledge the human flaws of many of those already in the Hall of Fame, and to understand the full historical range of so-called “cheating” behavior that predates the “steroid era” by decades. This is a nuanced topic that some wish to banish from discussion with a hardline sense of retroactive justice.

I wonder if Verducci missed this 1969 Sports Illustrated article about drug use in sports, with some prescient quotes at the top from Denny McLain.

The black-and-white persistence of the Romantics is fading away, but not because of any perceived moral relativism by a younger generation of writers or players who may shrug their shoulders at “juicing.” There is a heavy dose of realism and probity that is entering the discussion, a strong counter to those who wish to oversimplify.

What we are in now is the tail end of the Romantic era, for better or for worse. Some marginal candidates tied to steroids use may never get in, but with 14 years remaining on the ballot, Bonds and Clemens figure to gain induction. Their careers were well-established long before Major League Baseball began drawing a line against doping.

In blistering the zeal to sanitize the vote, Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports provides one of the few perspectives that puts the historical dereliction of duty by some Hall of Fame balloters in its rightful context:

This wasn’t just a referendum on steroids. It was one on the writers and their failure to recognize as long as they want the privilege of creating history, they must in doing so protect the worthy institution that finds them fit for the task. And considering the backlash following Wednesday’s revelation that it wasn’t just Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens who didn’t pass muster but Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza and so many others, the 10-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America with Hall of Fame votes seem not to care about the damage they’re doing.

Mark Haller of the Arizona Republic claims he’s “choosing to speak loudly by using silence” in declining to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot. But he has plenty more to say about why he’s doing what he’s (not) doing:

“The day of reckoning I’ve been dreading for five years — ever since Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens finally left the playing field and started the countdown to Hall of Fame eligibility — has arrived.

“With no guidance from either the Hall of Fame or Major League Baseball, no clarity from the courts or Congress, and no soul-baring from the players themselves, it’s up to the 600 or so Hall of Fame voters to be judge and jury for these symbols of baseball’s steroids era.

“The questions are unprecedented. Who was dirty? Who was clean? Who got an advantage from using performance-enhancing drugs and who didn’t?

“In the end, all we have is a ton of circumstantial evidence, a general acknowledgment that it was a dirty time in baseball for a lot of players, but no checklist telling us who juiced and who was clean.

“Hall voters are left with three options:

“Vote based on players’ career records and shelve the PED debate.

“Selectively vote based on whatever suspicions one might have.

“Vote for no one.”

Haller’s colleague Paola Boivin simplistically calls 2012 “the year of the cheater” and claims we are so “scarred” by the sports deceit all around us that “we don’t know who to trust anymore.”

My objections to the War on Steroids are not subtle, nor are they conflicted, as I have written here and here and here.

The caveat has always been that I’m more concerned about the public unaccountability of the taxpayer-funded USADA than athletes who are presumed guilty merely by being charged with doping. Including Lance Armstrong.

But expressing a desire to decriminalize the use of anabolic steroids and halt the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial powers in this area isn’t the same as cheering on athletes who dope.

And here’s where some conflicted feelings emerge. Ballots for the 2013 class of the Baseball Hall of Fame are due by Dec. 31, and a grand conundrum is unfolding over whether Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro are fit for Cooperstown.

Their names are all on the current ballot, but it’s unlikely they will get in, at least for now, because of the state of our public discourse on steroids and sports.

A number of other candidates have spoken out against the inclusion of steroids users, namely Barry Larkin and Dale Murphy, who is in his last year on a Hall of Fame ballot.

If I had a vote, both of these gentlemen would be in, especially Murphy, who played on bad teams in my hometown for too many years, which may ultimately cost him a spot in a place where he truly belongs. I do appreciate Larkin’s appeal to respect the “integrity of what the Hall of Fame stands for.”

These are important points to make, and a valuable conversation to have.

But as longtime sports journalist and Hall of Fame voter Ron Rapoport wrote recently, it’s a rather one-sided discussion, given the moralizing habits of his own tribe.

Writing on L.A. Observed over the weekend, Rapoport took the audacious view that all of those stained or dogged by steroids charges who are on the ballot ought to be voted in:

“I believe the steroid generation of players, of which these five players are among the most conspicuously accused, may well have saved baseball. I also believe these players’ greatest achievements will outlast not only their careers, but their lifetimes.

“Those of us who covered baseball during the strike that wiped out the 1994 playoffs and World Series well remember how bitter the players, owners and fans were then, and how dire the outlook for the game’s immediate future seemed. We also remember how the home run battles between Sosa and McGwire wiped away this bitterness in an instant and brought the fans running back to the ballpark in forgiveness and delight. Bonds’ assault on all-time home run records in the seasons that followed was equally transfixing as was Clemens’ age-defying march to 354 victories.”

Sports columnist Mike Lupica wrote a book celebrating the Sosa-McGwire duel, then became a come-to-Jesus anti-steroids scold when “Big Mac” was hauled before some of the same sanctimonious old birds in Congress who once hailed him for his feats.

While steroids have been banned by MLB since 1991, there wasn’t a uniform testing procedure in place until 2003. How can you draw a line across the careers of these individuals in “The Steroids Era” when the headmasters of the game couldn’t be bothered to enforce their own rules?

The moralists like to claim that players ought to observe a code of honor, but in reality few were paying much attention until anti-doping zealots gained enough media traction during the last decade. Former pitcher Tommy House (who caught Hank Aaron’s 715th home run ball in the Braves’ bullpen) is quoted by Rapoport as saying that “enhancements have been around forever.” Concluded Rapoport:

“I wonder where in the game’s lily-white, indentured-servitude, amphetamine-dispensing past, we can find total purity.”

I admit to some serious ambivalence about how I would vote, if I could. But ESPN’s Buster Olney, in assessing the obligations of the voter and claiming “it’s the writers, and the writers alone, who are the bottleneck,” really unlocks the issue for me:

“So the baseball writers ought to get out of the way rather than acting like overzealous crossing guards empowered by their ballots. The writers’ work should always reflect history, not determine legacies; that’s the work of the players, the good and the bad.”

Some of these voters are no more likely to vote for anyone linked to steroids than some on the Veterans Committee would welcome the recently departed Marvin Miller into the fold. That’s more than an omission, but a scandal bigger than anything Barry Bonds may have pumped into his body.