For Baltimore’s Rafael Palmeiro, yesterday’s announcement that he would be suspended for violating Major League Baseball’s drug policy could not have been more badly timed.

This year, as he steadily worked toward garnering his 3,000th hit, the baseball world finally noticed that the mustachioed slugger – previously most notable for starring in Viagra ads, winning a Gold Glove in a season in which he played only 28 games in the field, and being the subject of salacious rumors regarding his relationship with the wife of a former teammate, Ryne Sandberg – has been one of the very best players of his generation. A long-held hostility to the notion that he is worthy of the Hall of Fame was beginning to recede as the sheer scale of his monolithic numbers began for the first time to really make their impression on people’s minds.

At no point in his career was Palmeiro ever a truly great player. He has probably never even been the best player on his own team. He’s made only four All-Star teams in his 20 major league seasons and finished in the top 10 in MVP voting only three times (and never higher than sixth). Adjusted for league and park factors, his career OPS coming into this year was 32% better than average – less than the likes of long-forgotten sluggers such as Pedro Guerrero and Jack Clark.

Still, in a game whose defining feature in many ways is the brutality and relentlessness of its six-month schedule, showing up has a lot of value, and Palmeiro always showed up. Since 1986, he’s produced. He’s never been the best hitter in the league, he’s been among the top five only once or twice, and more often than not, he wasn’t even among the top 10. But he was good when Don Mattingly was the best first baseman in the game, he’s still good now that Albert Pujols is, and he was good in pretty much every one of the intervening years. When he retires, he will likely rank among the top 10 in career home runs, RBI, runs, and extra base hits. That these numbers are due largely to the time and place in which he played, and that likening him to a much more durable Jack Clark is unfair only in that Clark was a better player when both were at their best, doesn’t change the fact that his numbers are among the best in the history of the game. When Palmeiro became only the fourth man ever to record both 500 home runs and 3,000 hits this year, people finally started to acknowledge that.

How does yesterday’s revelation change this legacy? I don’t think it does at all. The question of what Palmeiro would have achieved had he never taken steroids is neither very relevant nor very interesting, because to answer it one must delve into the completely unknowable. Did drugs add 50 home runs to his career total? Two hundred? How to balance this against the fact that he was competing against similarly drug enhanced peers? No one can answer any of these questions.

The only sensible thing to do is treat the use of drugs as a condition of the game in his time, in something like the way we treat segregation. We accept that white players who played in white-only leagues were great as measured against their peers, discount their accomplishments according to our inclination because of the conditions under which they played, and leave things at that.

Yesterday’s news does and should, though, affect our view of Palmeiro. The man is revealed not only as an apparent liar and hypocrite, but as fundamentally dishonorable. He waggled his finger at congressmen and the nation and proclaimed to all, in categorical terms, that he had never used steroids; that claim seems more than a bit dubious now. Having tested positive for a banned substance, he now claims that he has no idea how it got into his body and continues to protest his innocence.

It’s not unthinkable that he’s telling the truth, but given the narrow list of drugs for which baseball tests, it seems extraordinarily unlikely – an impression that is given more heft by his unwillingness or inability to offer any remotely plausible explanation of how exactly he might have registered a false positive.

Assuming, as is probably true, that he is not telling the whole truth and that his history of using steroids extends back past the date of his congressional testimony, we’re now given the picture of a man who was not only willing to lie to Congress, but refused to seek refuge in the sort of vague evasions to which players like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa resorted. There’s a twisted sort of honor in that kind of defiance, but it’s ultimately the behavior of a scoundrel – even if one believes, as I do, that the hearings were a farce. One cannot, after swearing an oath to do so, opt out of telling the truth simply because one does not respect the proceedings.

All of this should, and probably will, count against Palmeiro as Hall of Fame voters judge his case. He will eventually get a plaque in Cooperstown – his numbers are just too overwhelming, and his wrongdoing certainly doesn’t rise to the level of the various segregationists and Klansmen who are already in the Hall. But a Hall of Fame plaque doesn’t mean a whole lot without a good name and reputation behind it, and Palmeiro has forfeited those.

The shame of it for him is that those players like Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, and McGwire, who have been remotely forthcoming about their steroid use, have generally been met with understanding. In the end, this is a case where the cover-up – the unseemly lying, Palmeiro’s pained insistence, against all evidence, that he has done no wrong – is probably worse than the crime.