When you come to it, voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame never makes any sense, because the electorate doesn’t understand baseball history. That’s a presumptuous thing to say, as the electorate is comprised of experienced baseball writers, but it’s the only way to explain results that are, year after year, completely incoherent.

To take one example, most fans who casually follow these things will fail to understand how anyone could not vote for Cal Ripken Jr. It’s rooted in the fact that no player has ever earned 100% of the vote, and a certain number of writers won’t vote for a player on his first year on the ballot, fearing that a unanimous induction would be equal to claiming that player was the greatest of all time. That’s nonsense, though. The only reason no one has ever won 100% of the vote is that at the time of the initial election, in 1936, the voters were catching up on nearly a century of baseball history. Lou Gehrig placed 15th in the balloting. If a similar vote were held today to start a Hall of Fame from scratch, no one — not Babe Ruth, not Hank Aaron, not Jackie Robinson — would get a vote on every ballot. It’s a silly reason not to vote for someone like Ripken.

While this is nonsensical, it’s more along the lines of a charming idiosyncrasy than something that undermines the credibility of the institution. This year it isn’t any sillier than usual. It also isn’t any less silly.

All the way down near the bottom of the voting tally, for instance, is longtime Detroit Tiger Alan Trammell. There’s no real argument to be made against his Hall of Fame case. He was a great shortstop in the American League for a decade, a strong hitter whose five best seasons match up well with those of Miguel Tejada and a strong fielder who won a pair of Gold Gloves. He had a long career, played exclusively in Detroit, and was a key contributor on the 1984 Tigers, one of the best teams of all time. He was actually similar to Derek Jeter, whose main tangible advantage over Trammell (and it’s not a small one) is his year-to-year consistency at the plate. And it’s not as if all of this took place in the remote mists of time — Trammell retired during Jeter’s rookie year. At any rate, he came in at 13.4%, so far below the 75% necessary for election that it’s clear he will never be voted into Cooperstown.

It’s also clear why he doesn’t get support. The numbers weren’t as big as they are today when he was in his prime, and he was a parttime player on some pretty bad teams during the last quarter of his career. What’s stunning isn’t so much that he isn’t close to being elected, though, but that he isn’t even garnering the votes someone recognized as a marginal candidate usually gets. Meanwhile, Jim Rice — a player who was, to be blunt about it, comparable to Luis Gonzalez without the defense, longevity, World Series ring, or 57-home run campaign — picks up 63.5% of the vote.

Imagine, 20 years from now, Luis Gonzalez getting five times as much support in Hall of Fame voting as Derek Jeter. This isn’t quite that absurd. But it’s close.

Up the ballot, things aren’t much prettier. Bert Blyleven came in with 47.7% of the vote. That’s in borderline territory, the problem being that Blyleven isn’t a borderline candidate. Imagine a player pitching as well as Tom Glavine did last year, with an extra 50 innings tacked on, for 20 years. That’s Bert Blyleven. Alternatively, imagine Nolan Ryan with more Cy Young-caliber seasons, fewer Advil commercials, and an ugly beard. That’s also Bert Blyleven. It’s a joke that he hasn’t been elected.

That Blyleven and Trammell are doing so badly in the voting isn’t the result of some quirks in the arguments for them — it’s the result of a basic, collective inability on the part of the voters to tell how good ballplayers were and where they stand in the game’s history. These are not complicated arguments. If two players are of comparable ability as hitters, and one is a good defensive shortstop and one is a left fielder, which is better? If two men are no. 1 or no. 2 pitchers for two different decades, throwing 250 innings a year of comparable quality for all that time, are they equals? These are not difficult questions. That the voters have proved unable to do so says more about them than it does about Blyleven, Trammell, and all the many other players who have been jobbed out of their rightful place in history.

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There’s no way to write about the voting this year without writing about Mark McGwire. Everyone knew he wouldn’t be voted in this year, but I was genuinely shocked to see that he only got 23.5% of the vote. As I wrote last week, I’m not convinced he belongs on the merits. In a nutshell, because he was pretty fragile and had some weak years in a relatively short career, the difference between his career offensive contribution and those of peers like Keith Hernandez, John Olerud, and Will Clark is, while substantial, smaller than you might think. It’s small enough that those players arguably made it up with their superb defense, and all of them had big seasons that compare well with McGwire’s best seasons. If they’re not considered serious Hall contenders (and they aren’t), I don’t think he should be.

That said, I doubt that even one person who left him off the ballot was reasoning along those lines, and while I can respect all the shades of opinion surrounding the steroid controversy, the plain fact is that McGwire — who no one doubts used performance enhancing drugs — never tested positive for anything. He is, in essence, being punished for not confessing to taking drugs and playing out some charade of contrition and forgiveness on 60 Minutes or Oprah Winfrey’s show.

Fair enough, I suppose, but I do hope that everyone righteously refusing to vote for him maintains consistent standards and refuses to vote not only for Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro, and Ryan Franklin, who have all either more or less acknowledged drug use or tested positive for proscribed substances, but for Jeff Bagwell, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, and Ivan Rodriguez, to name a few. The steroid suspicions surrounding these players aren’t as notorious as those surrounding McGwire, but they’re every bit as substantial.

Voting for them but not for McGwire would basically be saying not only that suspicion without proof is enough reason not to vote for players, but that it’s so only if it reaches a certain level of notoriety. That doesn’t make any sense. Any position on this issue has some arguments for it and some arguments against it, but the one thing no one can argue in favor of is inconsistent dealing based on shifting standards that deal more with intensity of suspicion than the fact of it. If this logically leads voters who would, absent a steroid controversy, vote for a player with 583 career home runs to the conclusion that if Piazza is to be voted in, so must McGwire, at least it’s a consistent position.

tmarchman@nysun.com