This Sunday, the National Baseball Hall of Fame will induct an exceptional class, highlighted by pioneering reliever Bruce Sutter and 17 players and executives associated with the Negro Leagues, among them the great Cristobal Torriente. It will be a wonderful day for baseball, and then, as they always do, the debates the Hall inspires will start anew.

Next year’s class will be one of the strongest ever seen, headed by eighttime batting champion Tony Gwynn and legendary iron man Cal Ripken Jr. Not only two of the very best players of all time, Gwynn and Ripken are universally respected; there’s no debate to be had about either one of them.That’s not so true of Mark McGwire, the third big wheel on the ballot.

If you’d said five years ago that the smart money would be on McGwire not getting into the Hall on the first ballot, you would have been considered insane. What’s changed since then is of course the climate. McGwire’s dissembling performance before a congressional committee investigating steroid use in baseball and the (stunningly credible, as it turns out) revelations of McGwire’s former teammate Jose Canseco, who claims that he and McGwire injected each other with steroids regularly during the Oakland Athletics’ late-80s heyday, have made many turn away from him in disgust.

There’s a place for the debate over whether McGwire’s presumed drug use should disqualify him from a spot in the Hall, but to me it’s a second-order issue.The first-order issue is whether or not McGwire’s qualified for the Hall at all, even assuming he played his whole career clean as can be.

I don’t really think he is.

Any Hall of Fame candidacy is defined basically by the answers to three questions: How good was the player? How long was he good? How does he compare to those already in the Hall? There are no right answers to these questions, but they’re essentially what we want to know when we ask, “Is he a Hall of Famer?”

To help answer these questions I’ll use WARP-3, a Baseball Prospectus statistic that accounts for how many wins a player was worth above an Andy Phillips-type fringe major leaguer. I do this not because I think a player’s value can be summed up in one number but because WARP-3 is adjusted for park, league, and era, and incorporates defense as well, allowing comparisons between players who competed in wildly different environments. For assessing whether one player was better than another in a given season this type of metric is a blunt tool; for grouping together large numbers of seasons and comparing them, it’s quite useful.

The way to get at the answers to our first two questions is to set some benchmarks.How many MVP-caliber seasons did McGwire have? How many All-Star type seasons? How many in which he was a solid regular? Here’s one way to look at it: He had one season with more than 10 WARP, which is around MVP level; six with 8–10 WARP, which is around All-Star level, and three seasons in which he had 5–8 WARP, which is a solid to very good performance.

The reasons for this aren’t complicated: McGwire missed a lot of seasons, he wasn’t all that good in many others, and even in the seasons where he hit exceptionally well, he was doing so in offense-friendly environments and wasn’t contributing with anything other than his bat. From 1988 to 1991, for instance, he hit 126 home runs and drew 362 walks, but didn’t do anything else at all, hitting .223 with miserable defense. Only in 1990 was he even in the top half among American League first basemen.Yes, he was a productive hitter despite the low averages, but there’s a high bar at first base; it’s not all that hard to find a productive hitter who can play the position.

McGwire’s Hall case basically rests on seven seasons — 1987, 1992, and 1995–1999. In all of them, he was a top hitter at first base. He was only clearly the best hitter at the position twice, though — in his rookie year, when he hit 49 home runs, and in 1998, when he hit 70. In every other year there was someone like Frank Thomas or Jeff Bagwell who was at least as good if not better, and often several such someones. Considering that he added next to no value outside those seven big seasons, you’d like to see a bit more dominance there. Sandy Koufax, after all, wasn’t among the best pitchers in the league every year for a few years — he was the best, outright, by huge margins.

Comparing McGwire to those already in the Hall of Fame makes the point pretty clearly.There are 14 20th-century first baseman in the Hall who played in the major leagues, ranging from legends like Lou Gehrig to obvious mistakes like Jim Bottomley. Those 14 had radically different career shapes — Gehrig had 10 MVP-caliber seasons and one as a solid regular, while Harmon Killebrew had one of the former and 10 of the latter — but they averaged, using the above-outlined definition, two MVP-caliber seasons, three All-Star caliber seasons, and five seasons as solid regulars.

If you compare him to his peers, McGwire does even worse. Fred McGriff, Rafael Palmeiro, John Olerud, Keith Hernandez, Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, and Will Clark were all rough contemporaries of McGwire’s and virtually all of them outshine him.They averaged three MVPtype seasons, four All-Star-class seasons, and five as solid regulars.Hernandez and Clark, who were also superb glovemen, each had three seasons on par with McGwire’s best season; Bagwell and Thomas each had five at that level; even Olerud, no one’s idea of a Hall of Famer, had two seasons, his 1993 and 1998 campaigns, in which he was roughly as valuable as McGwire was at his best, and as many seasons in which he was a good regular or better.

The case for McGwire isn’t about how good he was, or how long he was good, or how the quality of his career compared to Hall of Fame first basemen or his peers; it’s entirely about two numbers, 70 and 583, which were largely a product of playing in the biggest home run era in baseball history. Given that he has virtually nothing else going for him than two inflated numbers, I wouldn’t vote for him if I had a ballot, at least not yet — the Hall of Fame has plenty of first basemen as is, and plenty who are at least as qualified as McGwire coming up for election soon. And none of that even touches the steroids issue. I’m sure to be in the minority on this, but let’s at least come up with a compelling case that McGwire was a better player than Will Clark before we bronze his mug and hang it up next to Gehrig, Greenberg, and Foxx, let alone have him stand on a stage with Ripken and Gwynn, two incomparably superior players who happen to represent the best of baseball, rather than the worst.