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Players linked to steroid use have been resoundingly rejected by Hall of Fame voters in recent years, shunned as synthetically enhanced frauds. But drawing an integrity line in the sand is a tenuous stance at a Hall of Fame with a membership that already includes multiple virulent racists, drunks, cheats, brawlers, drug users and at least one acknowledged sex addict.

In the spirit of Groucho Marx, who refused to join any club that would have him as a member, would not baseball's 77-year-old gallery of rogues be the perfect fit for Bonds and Clemens?

Robert W. Cohen, who wrote the 2009 book "Baseball Hall of Fame — or Hall of Shame?", readily recalled a catalog of reprehensible acts by Hall of Fame inductees.

"Baseball has always had some form of hypocrisy when it comes to its exalted heroes," he said. "In theory, when it comes to these kinds of votes, it's true that character should matter, but once you've already let in Ty Cobb, how can you exclude anyone else?"

Cobb, portrayed as a sociopath in biographies and a Hollywood film starring Tommy Lee Jones, is without question the Hall of Famer mentioned most often whenever the integrity of the game's top players is questioned. Known as the Georgia Peach, he was often painted a racist and had numerous documented altercations with African-Americans off the field, including one that led to a charge of attempted murder.

Cobb, along with his fellow Hall of Famer Tris Speaker, was also implicated in a game-fixing scheme. Several researchers have written that Cobb and Speaker were members of the Ku Klux Klan, although that has never been conclusively verified.

"Plaster saints is not what we have in the Hall of Fame," said John Thorn, perhaps the nation's most widely known baseball historian and the author of more than a dozen baseball books. "Many were far from moral exemplars."

Cobb, who was included on 222 of 226 ballots during the inaugural 1936 Hall of Fame voting, is far from alone when it comes to baseball elite old-timers and imputations of racism, some of them blatant, recurring and historic.

"Cap Anson helped make sure baseball's color line was established in the 1880s," Thorn said of the Chicago Cubs first baseman and manager who was enshrined in the Hall of Fame the year it opened in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1939. "He was relentless in that cause."

Anson repeatedly refused to take the field if the opposing roster included black players. Anson had plenty of co-conspirators. The Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, also a member of the Hall of Fame class of 1939, "outed" the African-American infielder Charlie Grant, who was posing as a Cherokee on the preseason exhibition roster of the Baltimore Orioles team led by John McGraw (Hall of Fame class of 1937).

Overseeing baseball's segregationist policy in three decades was Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (Hall of Fame class of 1944). When Landis died in 1944, an initiative was begun to break the color barrier, an effort that culminated with Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers debut in the spring of 1947.

However, the Boston Red Sox, owned by Tom Yawkey (class of 1980), did not field their first black player until 1959.

Often, the miscreants in the Hall of Fame are viewed more like rascals than scoundrels or bigots. Babe Ruth (class of 1936), a prodigious drinker and womanizer and yet popular and revered, fits the category.

Casey Stengel (class of 1966) once called right fielder Paul Waner (class of 1952) a graceful player. Why?

"Because," Stengel said, "he could slide into second base without breaking the bottle in his hip pocket."

The famed Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko once wrote that Hack Wilson (class of 1979) should have been moved to first base from the outfield, where he usually played, "because he wouldn't have as far to stagger to the dugout."

Grover Cleveland Alexander (class of 1938) pitched better drunk than sober, according to the team owner Bill Veeck (class of 1991).