Longtime Houston Astros star Craig Biggio missed out on the Hall of Fame in heartbreaking fashion last year, appearing on just two ballots shy of the 75% threshold for election.

But players who come as close as Biggio did a year ago almost always make the Hall of Fame eventually, and so this year Biggio received 82.7% of the vote to coast into Cooperstown alongside Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz — the biggest class of elected Hall of Famers since 1955.

In an era of increasingly crowded Hall of Fame ballots, Biggio’s election should come as welcome news to contemporaries like Mike Piazza and longtime Astros teammate Jeff Bagwell. Not only does Biggio’s entry into the Hall take his name off the ballot for next year, but it helps establish a precedent for position players from his era.

Biggio never failed a drug test and did not appear on the Mitchell Report, but because he played when he did, he has not escaped largely baseball or circumstantial speculation that he used performance-enhancing drugs simply because he played where he did and when he did.

Excluding players from Cooperstown based on a retroactive guilty-until-proven-innocent witchhunt has always seemed silly. And with every player that gets elected from Biggio’s era, the Hall moves away from serving as a moral arbiter and closer to being a place that honors great ballplayers for how good they were at baseball and nothing more.