Mark McGwire hit 583 career home runs, including a then-record 70 home runs in 1998. No one has ever hit more home runs than Barry Bonds — in either a season (73) or throughout a career (762). Both of these players deserve a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

They may have cheated — along with seemingly an entire generation of players — but their actions on the field deserve recognition. It would be unfair to all players, not only those that played alongside them, but those who came before and those who will follow. We should not forget what the Hall of Fame is: a museum. (This idea has been discussed recently by Bill Simmons.) And what better way to cement the tainted records that wiped away the purity of an entire generation of baseball statistics than to enshrine the most notable players involved in the Hall of Fame? Can we simply forget the era as if it never happened (along with every other scandal in baseball history), a distinct branding of historical revisionism?

Another relevant question to ask is, What purity? Babe Ruth never faced the best pitchers of the Negro Leagues in his era. Bob Gibson was afforded a strike-zone from the letters to the knees and a few inches on either side of the plate in his era (compare that with today’s perceived strike zone). The mounds have been raised and lowered; the fences have been pushed back and moved in; the American League adopted the designated hitter rule; and teams introduced five-man pitching rotations. Free agency dramatically changed the landscape of baseball and continues to do so to this day. The fact is, all statistics are relative to the era in which they occurred.

In forty years, could you imagine a trip to Cooperstown without learning about Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens or Alex Rodriguez? Despite any controversies they bring (or brought), an evaluation of the league — and baseball itself — would be incomplete without these players. In many ways, they were the game, for good and for bad. The Hall of Fame is about the game, not only the best players that played by the rules, or the players that most likely played by the rules, or the players that cheated but were never caught.

The Hall of Fame needs to recognize the fallibility of baseball, and the rampant use of steroids would quite simply be an omission too big to miss.