NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – We live in a world where Bud Selig will more than likely be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame before Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens. And if that sounds OK to you, you need to wake up and face the truth.

If Bud Selig deserves a spot in the Hall of Fame, then so does Bonds, MLB’s all-time home-run leader. And so does Clemens, the man who has more Cy Young awards than anyone in baseball history. And so do any other all-time greats from the PED era whose numbers you had trouble reconciling because of drugs.

Bud Selig’s induction — which was approved Sunday, when he earned all but one vote from the Today’s Game Era Hall of Fame committee — should be looked at as a game-changer for the people who play morality police every Hall of Fame season. It’s a subject I tackle in my latest Open Mike video, live from baseball’s Winter Meetings at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center.

Bud Selig being in the Hall of Fame should have big ramifications. (AP) More

If you’re letting in Selig, whose legacy is a different kind of muddy but is still quite muddy, then you should let Bonds and Clemens in too. You can’t punish the players who thrived in an unruly era of baseball while also praising the man in power when it all happened, the man who didn’t do nearly enough to stop it.

And that’s considering about Selig and the steroid era. There was also the 1994 lockout, which shortened a could-be historic season and soured fans, and there are his compounded mistakes about the All-Star game, both the tie and the dumb home-field advantage rule.

None of that is to say Selig was a bad commissioner. In fact, he turned baseball into a revenue-generating machine. Under his watch, the game modernized as did the business model. And Barry Bonds hit 762 homers while also making some bad decisions and Roger Clemens had 4,672 strikeouts while doing some regrettable things. You see where this is going?

Selig deserves a place in the Hall of Fame because you can’t tell the story of the last three decades of baseball without him, warts be damned. And the exact same thing is true for Bonds and Clemens.

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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz