Here's the worst Hall of Fame ballot you'll see all year

There's been plenty of hand-wringing in recent years about the Baseball Hall of Fame, with voters eschewing players who have even the mere whiff of a PED taint to them. Hence, the voting members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America proudly elected no one to the Hall last year.

But one voter has taken that anti-PED moralizing to a new level this year. Behold, the logic of MLB.com's Dodgers beat reporter Ken Grunick as he explains why he only voted for pitcher Jack Morris:

Grunick won't only deny players definitively linked to PEDs — McGwire, Clemens, Bonds, and so forth — but rather anyone who "played during the period of PED use." That's an incredibly lazy attempt at a protest vote that casts so wide a net it actually collapses beneath two obvious logical fallacies.

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For one, the "period of PED use" dates back way, way before Bonds grew magic inflatable arms. Former pitcher Tom House says steroids and assorted PEDs were common back in his day, in the 1960s and 70s. Plenty of other players have come clean about the widespread use of "greenies" — little amphetamine pills — decades ago as well. Even Hank Aaron admitted to taking them to boost his performance.

If you're going to spurn everyone who played while PEDs were a part of the game, you may as well advocate for demolishing the Hall altogether.

It's possible Grunick more specifically meant the "steroid era," which spanned, roughly, the late 1980s to the late 2000s. Yet that too would undercut his one Hall selection.

Morris himself played through 1994 — or to put it another way, into the thick of the steroid era. And as HardballTalk's Craig Calcaterra pointed out, Morris' career overlapped with plenty of accused or proven juicers.

In other words, Grunick created an arbitrary, pearl-clutching criteria to posture about the Hall of Fame, and then ignored his own criteria to vote for just one player.