CLEVELAND, Ohio - Major league baseball will confer bronzed immortality on a few players Wednesday when the results of the national baseball writers' balloting for the Hall of Fame will be announced.

I had a 2017 ballot. I returned it signed, but blank, with an explanatory note.

The steroid era puzzle

I'm not voting again until baseball decides what to do about the elephant in the room, the so-called steroid era.

It was a confusing, controversial decade or so of rampant drug abuse, which has been ignored by the straw men in charge of the game. Clearly they, like many baseball writers, simply wish it would go away.

But it won't.

At the top of the cheat sheet

Regardless of the legalities, many fans and writers don't consider Barry Bonds' home run record to be legitimate. They regard it as an example of better slugging through chemistry.

To the likes of pitcher "Rocket" Roger Clemens the same stigma sticks, much like the bloody gauze stuck to his butt after a lackey testified before Congress that he injected Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

Clemens got 45 percent of the votes last year, nipping Bonds, with 44 percent, as the "best" of the rogues' gallery. A player needs to be named on 75 percent of the ballots to gain admission by the writers' vote.

The names on this year's ballot included several suspects and a few convicted users, including our once very own Manny Ramirez.

Ramirez is eligible for the first time, not that he has a snowball's chance in west hell of making it in this climate.

It's as if it never happened

Rejecting those players is tantamount to rewriting history and pretending their era never happened.

It doesn't take into account the widespread conspiracy of silence in trainers' rooms, clubhouses and executive offices, in which MLB -- in the wake of the cancellation of the 1994 World Series because of labor troubles -- needed the home run derby-like numbers to lure disillusioned fans back to the ballparks.

The biggest names of the era became similar to an unperson in George Orwell's "1984." An unperson was someone who had been executed and whose entire history had been erased.

Baseball bosses can stick their heads in the sand, but Bonds' 73-homer season really happened, as did Mark McGuire's 70 and Sammy Sosa's 66.

Alex Rodriguez, "A-Roid," who injected PEDs all the way up the ladder of history, is already a disgraced figure in the eyes of most fans and writers.

Voting for abusers

For years, I voted for the users because ball scuffers and moisteners, bat corkers, racists and misanthropes, even alleged game-throwers, were already Hall of Fame members.

I felt well over half of the players were using PEDs in the wild, wild West days. It was the competitive environment. Bonds, Clemens and the others were the best of a sordid time.

Cheating the clean players

The problem was that, as former Indian Kenny Lofton once complained, the cheaters crowded out the ones who were clean (whoever they might be) because the cheaters' statistics were as inflated as their muscles.

I was unhappy about cheating the innocent.

I was also dissatisfied with rejecting the best players of a lawless, unprincipled era on moral ground, which MLB had willfully abandoned.

MLB has to make up its mind

MLB officials should devise a formal ruling on the steroid era. At least, they should define it chronologically, probably from 1990 to the start of drug testing in 2003.

Designate that era as a separate voting classification, or use an asterisk for suspects, indicating the likely use of PEDs -- whatever baseball does, some kind of guidelines need to be set up.

Until they decide what to do about the stain on the game, I abstain.