There won’t be any suspension. No loss of income. No official rebuke.

Alex Rodriguez will face a far more unforgiving jury in the Baseball Writers Association of America than he has Major League Baseball. The court of public opinion won’t be kind, either.

But the lack of interest on Major League Baseball’s part to eliminate performance enhancing drug use in the 1990s and early 2000s has forced Hall of Fame voters to hand down the punishment.

Mark McGwire. Sammy Sosa. Rafael Palmeiro. Roger Clemens. Barry Bonds. And now Alex Rodriguez. Will any of these players be immortalized in Cooperstown? Remove the suspicion (or outright evidence) of steroid use from these players’ resumes, and they are all stone cold locks for the Hall.

A-Rod was supposed to be the guy who overtook Barry Bonds’ tainted home run record. He was supposed to be the guy who mashed balls because he had dumbells stapled to his arms, not because he was getting stuck in the behind with a needle.

We all know how this happened. The 1994 strike was a major blow to baseball’s popularity at a time when the NFL was already becoming “The National Pastime”. Then along came Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and the summer of 1998. We all watched with wonder as they launched moonshot after moonshot into the night sky and overtook Roger Maris’ iconic 61.

Major League Baseball was either asleep at the switch, or aware that there was more to this homerun surge than just meeting the ball with the sweet part of the bat.

Either way, it took the sport 6 more years to develop a viable anti-drug program. The Mitchell Report and the revelation today that 104 players tested positive for steroids in 2003 show just how out of control Major League Baseball allowed this to get.

Which leads us back to Cooperstown, where checkboxes on Hall ballots speak louder than anything. In the end, the elite players with Hall resumes will get their sentences 1 day a year for 15 years as the see their vote totals well short of the 75% needed for induction.

How A-Rod handles this SI story will be far more interesting than any of the other cases, as Rodriguez is an active player working to put the finishing touches on statistics that are not just Hall worthy, but stack up with the greatest ever. Sure, Bonds was still an active player once he was already under a cloud of suspicion, but didn’t the A-Rod story today catch you off -guard alot more than any BALCO stories connected to Bonds?

Plus, A-Rod plays in baseball’s most competitive and high profile division, for the sports most storied franchise, earning the sports most handsome paycheck. Imagine the pressure on him in 2009 to balance the endless media questions and fan taunting while at the same time trying to help a Yankee team that cannot afford to underperform after a much-ballyhooed offseason.