OK, let's get this out there right up front, before all you Cincinnati Reds fans storm the Blob's ramparts: I think Barry Larkin was most deserving of his selection to the Hall of Fame yesterday.

He was a fine player with solid Hall of Fame cred. And he's a good guy, besides.

Here's what I have a problem with: The people who are allowed to vote for this thing are in a lot of cases complete imbeciles.

I say this because it's come to my attention that somebody named Bill Mueller got four Hall of Fame votes this time around.

Now, I've heard of the guy. I think he played for the Cubs for awhile (along with most of Western civilization). But when I say I've heard of him, I mean I've heard of him in the same way I've heard of, say, Kurt Bevacqua of Biff Pocoroba. Or lichen, for that matter.

In other words: Just because I've heard of the guy doesn't mean he belongs in the Hall of Fame. Whoever voted for him should never be issued a ballot again.

In fact, that goes for pretty much all of them, if you ask me. In every sport in which the people who cover the sport are employed to decide its greatest players, they pretty much make hash of it. That's because, well, there are a lot of writers out there with fewer working brain cells than your average humanoid.

And so you get Heisman voters who, no lie, completely left Robert Griffin III off their ballots because he didn't play in the SEC. You get Hall of Fame voters who think Bill Mueller should be in there, but not, say, Tim Raines or Jack Morris, the winningest pitcher of the 1980s. And next year, you watch, these geniuses will decide overwhelmingly that Barry Bonds isn't a Hall of Fame player -- even though he's one of the five or six greatest players in baseball history, and had Hall of Fame numbers long before the Cream showed up with the Clear to soil his legacy.

Bonds and Roger Clemens both are up for consideration next year. They both should get in on the first ballot. Neither likely will for a long time to come, if ever, because the boneheads who've already unwittingly voted in dozens of other users of PEDs have now decided PEDs violate some non-existent Hall of Fame morals clause.

Yeesh.