Eligible members of the Baseball Writers Association of America have until Dec. 31 to vote for as many as 10 of the 37 candidates on this year’s ballot for enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. For election, a player’s name needs to appear on at least 75 percent of all ballots cast.

Thirteen former stars ”“ including Jack Morris, Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines and Don Mattingly ”“ have been considered before, but these days, more attention is being paid to three of the two dozen first-time nominees. Each possesses gaudy statistics, which up until a decade or so ago would have all but guaranteed first-year-of-eligibility induction. However, overwhelming evidence that each of the “big” three may have been chemically aided for a significant portion of his career has spawned spirited debate over, which (if any) of them should enter the hall, now or ever.

Perpetually cheerful outfielder Sammy Sosa is the only player in major league history to whack 60 or more round-trippers in three different seasons; overall, he slammed 609 career round-trippers, 545 of them for the Chicago Cubs. But in 1992, his first year with the team, Sosa was packing a mere 165 pounds on his 6-foot frame. That’s a far cry from the muscle-bound hulk who hammered 292 homers in the five seasons from 1998 to 2002. Though he was hardly the only player who claimed his vastly improved physique was due solely to lifting weights, the possibility of Sosa’s morphing from a spindly teenager into a Charles Atlas clone without some pharmaceutical assistance seems remote.

Barry Bonds, baseball’s all-time home run king and Roger Clemens, as dominant a hurler as Bonds was a batter, are also up for election this year, and based on raw statistics both clearly rank among the game’s all-time greats. But despite their pious denials, it’s difficult to believe neither used performance-enhancing substances, and if character, honesty and humility are criteria for inclusion, both should be turned away. Each entered the major leagues looking only slightly less slender than Sosa did when he debuted, but both departed two decades later with cartoonish physiques nearly as bloated as their respective egos.

It’s ironic this year’s Hall of Fame ballot was released the day after the death of Marvin Miller, the man whose tireless efforts enabled Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and many of their colleagues to earn eight-figure annual salaries for playing America’s nominal ”“ and at one time actual ”“ national pastime.

When Miller, who was an economist and negotiator for the United Steelworkers union prior to becoming head of the fledgling Major League Baseball Players Association in 1966, first visited spring training camps, he was greeted with suspicion by the very people he had been hired to help: A group of mostly uneducated players who had been brainwashed, by the businessmen who literally owned them, into thinking they were lucky to draw any salary at all for playing a child’s game. The minimum player salary when Miller took over the leadership of the union was $6,000 per year, a figure that hadn’t changed in two decades. During his 17 years at the MLBPA’s helm, the average annual salary of a big league baseball player increased a whopping 1,616 percent, from $19,000 to $326,000.

But that may have been the least of Miller’s achievements. After convincing his flock they were entitled to the same rights as other workers, Miller secured collective bargaining rights for the players in 1968, and in the agreement, won the right for disputes to be decided by an independent arbitrator. That ultimately led to the elimination of baseball’s reserve clause, which had tied players in perpetuity to the team that held their rights. Then, as now, it was inconceivable that an electrician, a welder, a teacher or a nurse would have been prevented from taking a job offering better pay and/or working conditions because their employer forbade it. Yet that was the power major league baseball team owners had prior to 1975, when arbitrator Peter Seitz made free agents of Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith, two pitchers who, at Miller’s urging, had played a season for their respective teams without having signed a contract that year.

In literature “irony” is defined as, “the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning.” Real life irony, though, is a bunch of people arguing over which egotistical, entitled, prevaricating players should or shouldn’t enter the Hall of Fame next month when Marvin Miller, whose accomplishments impacted professional sports in general and baseball in particular far more than the combined contributions of Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and any number of their chemically enhanced brethren, remained on the outside looking in until the day he died.

— Andy Young, who lives in Cumberland, is in his 11th year of teaching English in Kennebunk. He hasn’t yet secured a multi-year contract from his employer, but he does have a “no-trade” clause.