Carrying the Steroid Era into the Hall of Fame voting booth

Those emails and tweets? The ones in which you told me that my Baseball Hall of Fame ballot was all that’s wrong with the world? I received them.

They can be summed up thus: Why, oh, why didn’t you vote for Candidate A, who is warm, wholesome, clean as a whistle and a former member of the team I have been rooting for since I was conceived? P.S. You’re a hideous man.

Answer: Because I didn’t think Candidate A was deserving, in the same way you didn’t vote for your local library board member because you were pretty sure he and one of the librarians were doing more than re-stacking books together.

In other words, because we all bring our prejudices, beliefs and judgments into the voting booth.

Ken Griffey Jr., Trevor Hoffman and Alan Trammell got my votes.

Griffey and Mike Piazza were elected to the Hall on Wednesday.

Thank you for all the pleasant missives, Jeff Bagwell fans.

True, Piazza fans, your hero indeed has never been found guilty of taking steroids.

But performance-enhancing drugs were the scourge of baseball for about a 20-year period, and I look through that lens when I’m voting. No apologies. Lots of writers who have ballots have no such lens. They don’t have to apologize either.

Many of you believe that President Obama is evil incarnate, and many others believe Donald Trump is the greatest threat to humanity. Some of that belief is based on your feelings, research and personal histories, and some of it is based on how either man wore his tie that one Tuesday back in March. We call that “democracy.’’

I look at Piazza and, for my own reasons, don’t see a Hall of Famer. Is that uninformed and wrongheaded? Maybe. But the ballot doesn’t check my information or my head. It just wants my check mark.

Why, oh, why did I vote the way I did? Because I could.