Anthony Reiber: Steroid cloud over Baseball Hall of Fame selection just won't go away

If you love baseball and you love the Hall of Fame, you wanted Wednesday's news conference in the ballroom at the stately St. Regis Hotel to be about the men on the dais and the one who wasn't there.

You wanted it to be about old ballplayers who really aren't that old swapping stories and ribbing each other. You wanted it to be about celebrating the lives and careers of Mariano Rivera, Mike Mussina and Edgar Martinez, and the too-short life and career of the late Roy Halladay.

In that midtown ballroom, for that hour or so, that's all it was about. It was a celebration as pure and as wondrous as the dreams of a kid from Panama who played youth baseball in bare feet and went on to become the best closer the game has ever seen. It was about a third baseman who had to become a designated hitter in a remote baseball outpost in the Northwest corner of the country so he could let his prodigious bat blaze an unexpected trail to Cooperstown. It was about a pair of right-handers, one still with us and one tragically not, who set the standards for their generation in an era when the ball may have been juiced and the players certainly were.