Last week, three dead men were inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. At a rain-delayed ceremony at Cooperstown’s Doubleday Field, a small crowd of diehards witnessed Deacon White (catcher), Jacob Ruppert (club owner who built Yankee Stadium), and Hank O’Day (umpire) get canonized in lieu of our generation’s heroes, the grandees of baseball’s so-called “steroid era.”

Since a player must be retired for five years to be eligible for the Hall, this year marked the first crucible for many of the tainted stars of the nineteen-nineties and aughts. Earlier this winter, many of the Hall’s electors used this chance, and their non-votes, to protest the game’s alleged cheaters. Under normal circumstances, the first ballot appearances of Roger Clemens, one of the best right-handed pitchers on record, and Barry Bonds, baseball’s all-time home-run leader, would have been the occasion for a major fête. Instead, Cooperstown saw a fraction of the usual attendance, only the most zealous pilgrims, dressed piously in the jerseys and caps of their hometown teams. In the empty hall, you could hear echoing footsteps; a museum security guard could be seen leaning against a wall in the “Hank Aaron, Chasing the Dream” exhibit, taking a little nap.

Around the village of Cooperstown, people were whispering about Alex Rodriguez, the greatest hitter still active in the game. Just that morning, the league had threatened him with a rare lifetime ban for his repeated use of banned substances. (Ultimately, Major League Baseball suspended A-Rod for two hundred and eleven games, a decision he is appealing.)

To compensate for this year’s melancholic referendum on the steroid era, the Hall dug deep into history for solace. There was something glaring in its decision to turn back the clock as far as possible, to a time long before any aging star stuck a needle in his ass, back to the safety of a remote period when a catcher like the 2013 inductee Deacon White (b. 1847), who played for such teams as the Cleveland Forest Citys and the Boston Red Stockings, stood manfully behind home plate without the aid of a glove, much less a face mask or other protective gear, and hitters were allotted a gentleman’s five strikes and eight balls. It’s easier to dust off a Victorian ancestor with a walrus mustache than to deal directly with the ambiguities of the moment.

The anxiety about contemporary heroism is felt particularly among baseball’s literati. They have good reason to fret. Almost every year since the Hall began to take shape, in 1936, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America has voted to determine which players will be enshrined in the pantheon. It’s a task that the “scribes,” as they like to refer to themselves, regard as a sacred duty.

It’s a fitting role for writers. The legends of the game have always been formed in word as much as deed. In the old days, scribes magnified the exploits of players and offered a much more basic service: they brought the park to the people. In baseball’s early years, buying a ticket was the only way to watch a game, which meant that most people never saw their team in action and even fewer saw them play up close—a form of distant fandom unimaginable today. With the exception of fleeting images in occasional newsreels, the only way to experience the splendor of Babe Ruth’s swing, or of Lefty Grove striking out the side, was to read about it in the papers and magazines (and, after 1916, in the emerging form of the baseball novel). It was the job of radiomen to animate the action in the moment, and the job of the scribes to set the scene, spin the plots, develop the characters, and amplify the story over many seasons. It was only natural that writers would be gatekeepers of the Hall.

The scribes’ dominance over Hall elections has long been a matter of controversy, particularly among the always-contentious group of scribes themselves. Although they generally seem to relish their power over baseball’s stars—no doubt a nerdish revenge fantasy on celebrity jocks—scribes these days are feeling burned by the steroid era.

Filip Bondy, a New York Daily News reporter who reluctantly voted for Clemens, Bonds, and three other suspected steroid users, wrote about the stresses of this year’s vote.

I didn’t enjoy mailing in the ballot and I’m not particularly upset that none of these players attracted enough votes from fellow writers. I feel sorry for everyone trying to deal with this issue, including the voters, and grow angrier at the cheaters for dividing us into warring cliques.

The Hall electors have every reason to be angry with the players. But what about the writers themselves? Was there anyone closer to the action, to the players, than the game’s reporters? The use of performance-enhancing drugs, especially in the nineties, was hardly a subtle matter. When a player’s facial features morph, when his head grows two hat sizes larger, when a wiry first baseman begins to resemble a bodybuilder, one tends to notice these changes. Some beat reporters saw Mark McGwire in the clubhouse every day, season after season. As reporters, wasn’t it their job to investigate, to ask questions, to develop good sources? Instead of remaining skeptical, many scribes were, like all of us, dazzled by the home runs and the drama of witnessing new records, and caught up in following the sagas of duelling sluggers. In spinning the grand story, writers were given a taste of glory, and enjoyed some of the best sports copy since the days of Ruth and Aaron.

In 1961, writers had the privilege of reporting on Roger Maris’s doing the near impossible and breaking the Babe’s single-season record of sixty home runs. At the turn of the twentieth century, they got to see Ruth’s record surpassed six times, including McGwire’s truly impossible seventy, in 1998, and Bonds’s seventy-three, in 2001. It’s almost touching now to read the breathless, sort-of embarrassing “Special Commemorative Issue” that Sports Illustrated published in 1998 to honor the “Great Home Run Race” between the juicers McGwire and Sammy Sosa. The steroid era was a moment of deception but also of starry-eyed self-deception; if it was a breakdown of integrity on the part of baseball’s stars it was also, in some measure, a failure of sports journalism.

Because the steroid story usually takes the form of a blame game, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reflection on the role that they, the baseball writers—or, for that matter, any dedicated observer of the game—may have played as enablers of cheating. I wonder about this myself. I remember watching Mark McGwire transform into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float version of himself and hit nine-thousand-foot home runs every other game and thinking that something was amiss. In that very same moment, I also somehow shelved my doubts so that I could enjoy the spectacle or, when I was feeling fancy, “witness history.” The sportswriting of that period, too, reveals a curious human talent for simultaneously knowing and not knowing.

Consider the case of Sports Illustrated’s veteran baseball man, Tom Verducci. He was one of the savvier reporters who got it right and who did something about the problem. He is also, as he recently wrote, “slightly tougher than average” on the question of inducting steroid-implicated players into the Hall of Fame. He didn’t vote for Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens this year and doesn’t seem intent on giving them the nod any time soon (though he does predict that they will eventually gain enough support to reach the stringent threshold for induction into the Hall: seventy-five per cent of the vote).