The Hall is already the home of dozens of players who took amphetamines, a drug just as illegal as steroids, but one that the game started testing for only this past season. Mickey Mantle took them. Willie Mays took them. Darned near everybody took the pills known as “greenies” and kept in bowls like M&Ms in every trainer’s room in the game. (Willie, by the way, had a liquid amphetamine concoction he called “red juice.” No matter what you called it and what form it took, it did a bang-up job of knocking the cobwebs out when you were on short sleep.)

Few fans ever cared about amphetamines because there was never any indication that they helped players hit more home runs. They just helped players wake up.

Other players cheated their way into the Hall. Don Sutton was one of that ilk, as was Gaylord Perry. So was Whitey Ford and who knows how many other pitchers who cut, scuffed, lubricated and otherwise did things to baseballs that would make them curve in ways not intended by nature. Unlike the players popping pills and shooting up with stanazolol, the pitchers actually broke the stated rules of the game. They even bragged about it. Instead of being thought of as the embodiment of evil, such pitchers were viewed as legends of the game. They cheated fair.

So the objection to McGwire can’t be about using illegal substances or cheating. Neither of those activities have ever kept anyone else out. Why should they keep Big Mac out?

I know the answer: McGwire broke the most sacred record in baseball’s hallowed book; he hit more home runs than anyone had hit before.

If the fans and media could climb on Roger Maris, who never did anything wrong and was as upstanding a man as you’ll find in the game, when he was chasing Babe Ruth, it’s no surprise they’d get on McGwire, too. That’s baseball’s problem for being so wrapped up in sacred numbers, not McGwire’s problem for having rendered the numbers 60 and 61 meaningless. If you challenge the sacred home run record, you better be ready to take a lot of grief. (You can double check on that with Hank Aaron; he’ll tell you the same thing.)

That shouldn’t be held against McGwire. Even when he was a tall but relatively skinny kid first-baseman with the A’s, he was the prototypical power hitter. It’s probably 15 or 20 years since I first wrote that he was the kind of hitter who could break Maris’ single-season record. With or without the juice, he was one of the premier power hitters we’ve ever seen.

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And the juice is irrelevant. Again, baseball had no rules against using drugs, so that’s not even up for debate. The game wanted a lot of home runs, and he obliged it. Along the way, he pulled in fans in record numbers and helped restore the game to health after the 1994 strike.

OK, he embarrassed himself in front of Congress, but that was four years after he retired. It’s irrelevant.

That’s really all there is to it. McGwire played by the rules, which is more than can be said of a lot of other members of baseball’s shrine. He hit more home runs than anybody. He belongs in Cooperstown, and I’m doing my part to put him there.

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