Nearly two weeks later the debate rages on over the outcome of the Hall of Fame voting. It has dominated baseball’s off-season. Even the Hall of Famers themselves, elected by the writers in a less controversial, less contentious, time, have added their views.

But as the all-steroids, all-the-time discussion has gone on, it has prompted a long-nagging question in my mind: why steroids and not alcohol?

Asked that question, baseball people usually give the simple answer: alcohol is legal, steroids are not. Or they might add: alcohol doesn’t enhance performance; steroids do.

However, to repeat the start of a column I wrote nearly six years ago, “Alcohol last week killed one more major league baseball player than steroids ever have.”

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With spring training quickly approaching, one might think from reading Web site and newspapers (does anyone still read newspapers?) that Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse and Rafael Soriano are the only free agents out there who have yet to get jobs.

There are, in reality, many free agents still seeking jobs, but the focus falls on the trio of Bourn, Lohse and Soriano because they are clients of Scott Boras, and Boras is everyone’s favorite agent to hate.

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While this week’s results of the Hall of Fame election have prompted widespread discussion about Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Mike Piazza, I prefer to discuss Tim Raines.

A 23-year major league outfielder, who had 70 or more stolen bases in six successive seasons in the 1980s, Raines, with 52.2 percent, was one of five players who gained more than 50 percent of the 569 votes in this year’s writers’ election. It was his best showing in six years on the ballot, marking the fourth straight year his percentage has risen.

Unlike Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and Piazza, Raines was untainted by the admission or the suspicion that he used steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs. Raines, however, made a different admission and had his own special taint.

With Raines’ vote total rising, the voting members of the Baseball Writers Association are either forgetting or ignoring that Raines admitted in 1982 and in subsequent years that he used cocaine.

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