One of the things I enjoy about this part of the baseball year is reading columns in which Hall of Fame voters lay out their ballots and the reasoning behind them. These range from the wonderfully insightful to the deliriously insane, and when read year after year, they index the rise and fall of ballplayers’ reputations better than just about anything else could.

This year, of course, most voters are writing about Mark McGwire. He will not be elected to Cooperstown this year, and may not be for quite some time. Voters generally either think he’s a cheater and thus won’t vote for him, or want some time to reflect on how to fit steroid use into the broader context of the game’s history. A minority figures that he cheated with the tacit approval of fans, the press, and owners, and so think he should be voted in. A very small minority figures him innocent until proven guilty.

These are all respectable positions, but what bothers me is the shared assumption that McGwire would, if there were no questions about steroid use, be qualified for the Hall. I don’t think this is true. He’s a borderline candidate who’s taken far more seriously than equally qualified candidates because of a general obsession with numbers and the tendency to value those who do one thing incredibly well over those who do many things well.

McGwire’s entire candidacy revolves around how many home runs he hit and how many walks he drew. That’s not to denigrate his power hitting and batting eye; knocking the ball and reaching first base are pretty much the two most important things a player can do, and he did them about as well as anyone, ever. The problem is that McGwire did literally nothing else well. He didn’t hit for average, didn’t play notably good defense, didn’t play a difficult defensive position, and didn’t run the bases well. More important, he wasn’t very durable, and he didn’t have a long career. In fact, he was below par in all these areas, enough so that when you look at the big picture, he doesn’t seem to have been much more valuable to his teams than peers like Keith Hernandez, John Olerud, and Will Clark. Each of these men were, in their best seasons, every bit as valuable as McGwire was when he hit 70 home runs; each of them had as many big seasons as he did; each had a career of comparable length. The problem is that their value wasn’t as focused as his was, so it’s harder to see it.

In 1979, for instance, when he shared the National League MVP award with Willie Stargell, Hernandez hit .344 with 11 home runs. That year he was about as good as McGwire was in 1998. He was playing in a tougher hitting environment and was a tremendous defensive player, while McGwire was a lousy one, two factors that together cut away an enormous amount of the difference between the two. The story of that season is writ large over their careers. Hernandez contributed about as much on the field, but because it was dispersed across different phases of the game — hitting for average and gap power, defense, durability — you can’t pick out one big number like McGwire’s home run total and focus on it as proof of his accomplishments. The same is true in different ways of Olerud and Clark, as well as Rafael Palmeiro, and Fred McGriff. It wouldn’t at all be difficult to make a case for any of these players as being McGwire’s equal, and if you value longevity and durability as much as peak excellence, it would be quite easy to make a case for the latter two as being superior to McGwire.

Note the players not even mentioned here. Frank Thomas, a similar but superior player, isn’t mentioned. Neither is Jeff Bagwell, who’s a level above Thomas, McGwire, and the rest of his peers, and will be remembered as the best first baseman to play between the primes of Eddie Murray and Albert Pujols. Neither are Jim Thome, Carlos Delgado, or Todd Helton, all of whom, with a few good years, could well enter McGwire’s orbit.

Here we come to the problem. It’s in the nature of the Hall of Fame to discriminate among all the great players who have ever played, and pick out only the very best. There are, depending on how you count, about 14 20th-century first basemen in Cooperstown right now. Exactly how many from McGwire’s generation are going to earn a plaque? Are we going to double the number of first basemen in the Hall? There’s no real argument to be made against Bagwell and Thomas. The problem with inducting lesser players is that once you’ve inducted one, there’s a strong argument to be made for inducting the rest. If you elect McGwire, you’ve made the case for inducting Hernandez, and thus for inducting Olerud, and Mc-Griff, and so on down the line.

I hope voters hold off on McGwire until we can get a fix on how to distinguish among these players. There’s very good work being done now with analysis of historical defensive and baserunning statistics; I’d like to see that work really mature and use it to measure McGwire against his peers. Maybe he deserves more credit for his glovework than I’m inclined to give him. Maybe Hernandez and Olerud deserve a lot less. If that were so, it would open a big gap between them, because McGwire was a stronger hitter. It would provide some reason to rank him as one of the best of all time besides gaudy hitting numbers that, given the environment in which he played and his lack of durability and longevity, don’t reflect how valuable McGwire really was.

In itself, the question of McGwire’s Hall qualifications is what it is — I know that for most people it is, and will continue to be, about steroids. Keeping the focus on what he did, though, is a lot more interesting, because it gives some insight into how enraptured we still are by numbers. We all know that hitting 70 home runs in 1998 didn’t mean as much as it would have in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher. Why not follow that knowledge to its logical conclusion and admit that if a player like McGwire who slugs .588 does enough things poorly, and a .465 slugger like Hernandez does enough things well, the latter just might be an equal or superior player? Why, in 2006, should our opinions of players be captive to a few statistics?

tmarchman@nysun.com