Yes, it was cheating.

The sports press is abuzz about the pending announcement of baseball’s annual Hall of Fame vote, which will likely exclude Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens due to their use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Of course, there are a lot of opinions on this stuff, and a lot of ink is being spilled in particular by the baseball writers who covered the steroid era. They claim expertise as firsthand witnesses, but the subtext any fan should read between every line of all this recent journalism is that the writers’ own credibility is also at stake in baseball’s post-steroid reckoning. After all, the writers’ credulity in chronicling certain steroid-fueled feats was a major enabler of the whole charade for public consumption in the first place.

In this context, I have to say, Allen Barra’s* latest piece in Salon deserves special mention. He trots out two old arguments for letting steroid users into the Hall:

1. We’re still not sure if steroids even affect performance on a baseball diamond at all.

2. Steroids weren’t against Major League Baseball’s rules during what we now call “the Steroid Era,” so using them didn’t really constitute cheating to begin with.

At this point, the first argument is so absurd it’s not even worth debating. Even Barra allows that Barry Bonds’s late-career surge was clearly fueled by steroids, but that was only because Bonds had some magical concoction that the NASA-caliber geniuses at one particular private laboratory were able to devise. As for the rest of the guys using Brand X stuff, hey, maybe they could’ve all hit 50 or 60 home runs a season without it for all Barra knows.

By the way, that lab Bonds used was run by this guy:

As for Barra’s second point — the rule-based defense — I think that calls for more serious debunking. As a fan, I still hear it a lot in the stands at games, in sports bars, et cetera.

The crucial flaw is that steroid use has been illegal under U.S. federal law since 1990, around the dawn of what we now consider baseball’s “Steroid Era.” Obviously, federal law trumps the MLB rulebook. We could just as easily rephrase the steroid defenders’ argument like this: “Hey, those players never broke any league rules, just federal law. What’s the big deal?”

Sounds kinda stupid when you put it like that, doesn’t it? And you know what, even that interpretation is a bit charitable because it allows for some innacuracy that works in the steroid apologists’ favor.

In fact, MLB has long had rules against using any drug that’s illegal in society. Ergo, if steroids and other performance enhancers were illegal, they were automatically also against MLB’s rules, even if the league didn’t have a specific list of banned PEDs of its own.

This is why MLB commissioner Fay Vincent sent a memo in 1991 to all the clubs outlining the league’s anti-drug policy, including a specific section on steroids. Up high in the document, he writes: “The basic drug policy for the game is simply stated: There is no place for illegal drugs in Baseball.”

This policy was in effect more than a decade before baseball was able to establish a steroid testing program via collecutive bargaining with the players’ union, which is what the supposedly expert sportswriters really mean when they say “steroids weren’t banned” by MLB. However, a far more accurate characterization of history is that Vincent did indeed enact a steroid ban in 1991, echoing federal law. That initial ban didn’t have good enforcement “teeth” at the time because of union obstructionism, but the league added better teeth later as it became possible.

Looking back, Vincent’s do-the-best-you-can approach in 1991 makes a lot of sense when you consider that MLB is a multibillion-dollar business. Such an enterprise simply can’t condone illegality in its midst. That’s especially true if the illegality direcly affects production of the product, which in MLB’s case is the play on the field.

It should also go without saying that if both the commissioner and Congress tell you not to do something, but you do that thing anyway, you’re most definitely cheating by any reasonable meaning of the word.

*DISCLAIMER: I was a markets reporter at the Wall Street Journal for several years during the period when Barra wrote a sports column for the paper analyzing sports statistics — and rarely mentioning the possible effects of PEDs on such. Since we were in different departments, I had no firsthand dealings with Barra at the time, good or bad, though I did read his column regularly.