Next year, Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken, Jr. will come up before Hall of Fame voters for the first time, and both will of course be elected. Mark McGwire will also be on the ballot for the first time, though his shameful performance before a shameless congressional committee this year may incite enough sportswriters to withhold votes and deny him the prestige of becoming a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

In the years after, the pickings will become more slender. 2008 will see Tim Raines – who should be a lock for election, but isn’t – as the most prominent first-time nominee; the year after will see, Rickey Henderson excepted, Mark Grace as the most famous freshman; and in 2010, Edgar Martinez will be the only first-timer with a prayer of entry.

So, not only should holdovers like Bert Blyleven, Andre Dawson, and Alan Trammell keep hoping the voters will re-evaluate their accomplishments over the next few years, but so should this year’s biggest names – Will Clark, Albert Belle, Orel Hershiser, and Dwight Gooden. None is by any conceivable standard a lock for the Hall, but neither would any of them be nearly the worst members of the institution at their positions.

This last argument is often, and justly, ridiculed, but it’s also much of the reason for the enduring appeal of the annual Hall of Fame debate. The lack of any clear criteria for enshrinement, and the presence of players who not only weren’t Willie Mays-type immortals, but weren’t really all that good (you’d have to be charitable to say Freddy Lindstrom was any better than Mike Lowell),mean anyone can make a plausible argument for anyone they want. Good times, I say.

The more of this sort of debate that goes on over the next few years – and with such a lackluster crop of names coming onto the ballot, it will be going on a lot – the more the virtues of Will Clark will be realized. I’m not sure I’d vote for him, but you don’t have to point out that he’s better than George Kell to make an argument for him. Without discounting for any illegal advantages, he was better than McGwire, whose career oddly paralleled, and unfortunately overshadowed, his own.

Scoff all you want. McGwire has huge, obvious advantages – he hit 300 more home runs than Clark, walked 400 more times in 1000 fewer plate appearances, set notable home run records, played a huge role on a great Oakland club in the late ’80s, and so forth. Granting all that, Clark was the better of the two.

How so? Well, first there are those 1000 extra plate appearances. Clark was hardly the picture of health through his career, but he stayed on the field more than McGwire did, averaging 132 games per season to McGwire’s 117. That gap of two seasons’ worth of playing time helps his case a lot.

Clark has other advantages – he batted 40 points higher than McGwire over their careers, hit nearly 200 more doubles, and was a truly exceptional defender, whereas McGwire was among the worst ever seen.

“But,” you say, “McGwire had big seasons. There are lots of guys who played more than McGwire but weren’t as good. “True enough, but Clark’s best seasons were as good as McGwire’s, if not better. In 1989, Clark hit .333 with 23 home runs and 74 walks. I’d argue he was at least as valuable that season as McGwire was in 1998, when he more famously hit .299 with 70 home runs and 162 walks.

Clark played in a league that scored 3.94 runs per game; McGwire in one that scored 4.60 per game. Clark – who grounded into almost no double plays, stole a few bases, and otherwise played a three-dimensional offensive game – created 131 runs, McGwire 179. In an offensive context like McGwire’s that would have been 153, without even accounting for the fact that Clark played in Candlestick Park, a notoriously tough place for a left-handed hitter to swat a home run.

Consider that the difference between a Gold Glove first baseman at the top of his game, as Clark was in 1989, and an immobile slugger at the midpoint of his, as McGwire was in 1998, is about 25 runs over the course of a season, and the point about how good Clark was becomes clearer.

Clark had a lot of big seasons. He was about as good, all around, in 1988 as he was the following year – clearly better, I think, than McGwire was in any year other than 1998. And his 1991 and 1992 campaigns were similarly better than McGwire’s third- and fourth-best seasons.

How all this has already been forgotten is a bit odd. Clark made six of seven All-Star teams between 1988 and 1994, and was thought of when he came up from the minors the way Albert Pujols is thought of today, as the most complete and best young first baseman anyone could remember seeing, one with a long and brilliant career in front of him and an eventual lock for the Hall of Fame.

Part of it is obvious – Clark lost time to the strike in 1994 and 1995 like everyone else did, and by 1996 he was 32, an age when slow first basemen start breaking down. The result was a five-year run in which he never appeared in more than 132 games, and twice in only 110. Then there was the appearance of a new crop of great young first basemen like Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas, and the fact that he wasn’t a dominant home run hitter, and the fact that he had his best years just before the beginning of the biggest and longest-sustained offensive boom in the game’s history, when scrub players regularly put up numbers that dwarfed those Clark posted in his prime.

But there’s not much, statistically or otherwise, separating Clark from Hall of Famers like Willie McCovey and Hank Greenberg, once you adjust for era effects. And there’s little that would make you think less of him than his statistics would suggest – while he had a reputation for redneckery coming perilously near racism, he also had a reputation as a great clutch hitter and team leader, and performed exceptionally well in seven postseason series (including a .468 BA/.529 OBA/.806 SLG line in three League Championship Series). In his last hurrah with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2000, he batted .345/.426/.655 down the stretch while filling in for an injured McGwire, helping drive his team into the playoffs, where he dominated.

I don’t think Clark will ever get into Cooperstown – there are too many first basemen there already, and even better ones coming up right behind him on the ballots. It’s a shame. But whether or not his plaque is ever hung on the wall besides those of Lindstrom and Kell and Rick Ferrell, who was accidentally elected by Veterans Committee members who mistook him for his brother Wes, Clark was one of the best players ever to take the field.

tmarchman@nysun.com