If you read much baseball writing, you’ve surely been subjected to hand wringing from a Hall of Fame voter agonizing over whether to vote for presumed steroid user Mark McGwire this year. I don’t understand why anyone’s torn up over this. McGwire is, even ignoring steroids, hardly an imposing candidate; Will Clark was a better ballplayer, and he didn’t even get enough votes last year to stay on the ballot. It wouldn’t be a disgrace if McGwire made Cooperstown, but it also wouldn’t be a disgrace if hip-hop legend Large Professor earned a plaque for his 1991 classic “A Friendly Game of Baseball.”

The real shame of the McGwire controversy, which has kicked up this week as ballots have been sent out to voters, is that it’s going to dominate all Hall of Fame discussion this winter. That’s unfortunate, not just because the immensely great Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. would be much better objects of attention, but because there are other wonderful players making their first appearances on the ballot — players with no chance whatever of being elected who are nevertheless worthy of reminiscence and respect.

I have, for instance, never seen a more talented or electric player than Eric Davis. In 1987 he hit .293 with 37 home runs, 84 walks and 120 runs scored in just 129 games, stealing 50 bases while only being caught six times and playing a beautiful center field. The year before, he stole 80 bases. He was basically Ken Griffey Jr. with Jose Reyes’s speed. If he’d stayed healthier, not only would Griffey have played his whole career in Davis’s shadow, but Barry Bonds may have had a true peer.

Davis was never able to take full advantage of his gifts, though. He played as many as 125 games only seven times in his career, never more than 135, and endured everything from a lacerated kidney (while diving to spear a line drive in the clinching game of a World Series victory, which his team won 2–1) to a fastball to the groin to knee damage so severe he had to temporarily retire at 32 after having played 60 games the previous two seasons. Far from a chandelier, he was perhaps the toughest man in the game — he endured chemotherapy for colon cancer in 1997, came back that same season, and hit a home run in the playoffs. His talent was just too much for his body.

Whenever was healthy enough to take the field, Davis was always a remarkable player — at 36, a cancer survivor, he hit .327 BA/.388 OBA/.582 SLG for the Orioles. There are many who would have been Hall of Famers if not for injury, but very few (Charlie Keller comes to mind) who would so clearly have ranked among the greatest of all time had their bodies not betrayed them. Short as he fell of what he could have done, though, Davis was an astonishing player.

Bret Saberhagen’s story is similar to Davis’s, and if anything more of a shame, because if he came to the majors 15 years later than he did, he might have preserved his health. One of the mysteries of baseball in the 1980s was Saberhagen’s odd pattern of pitching brilliantly in odd-numbered years and merely effectively in even-numbered ones. In 1985, at 21, he went 20–6 for the Royals and won a World Series ring and the Cy Young; the next year he went 7–12. That would be the pattern for years. In 1987, he went 18–10; in 1989, 20–6 with a 2.16 ERA, racking up another Cy Young; in 1988 and 1990 his record was a combined 19–25. He never pitched as many as 200 innings in a season after turning 25.

In retrospect, it’s clear what was going on — Saberhagen was pitching absurd numbers of innings, and they took a toll on his arm. He pitched more than 250 innings four times through age 25. The on-year/off-year pattern stemmed from his arm’s need to recover from the strains of pitching so much. It finally broke down, culminating in two horrible years at Shea Stadium as the chief bleach-sprayer for the “Worst Team Money Could Buy.” Given time to recover, though, he still had more than enough stuff to get anyone out — in 1994 he won 14 games and walked only 13 men, which may be the coolest thing anyone has ever done in a Mets uniform.

If Saberhagen came up today, his pitch counts would be closely monitored, and he wouldn’t pitch 250 innings a year. He probably wouldn’t have the chance to be as brilliant as he was in 1985 and 1989, but he would also stay a lot healthier. In frame, approach, and stuff, today’s most similar pitcher is Houston’s Roy Oswalt, and while he hasn’t been used as heavily as Saberhagen was, he turns in a Cy Young–caliber performance every year. That should have been Saberhagen, and Oswalt’s success is a sign of the way baseball learns from mistakes.

There are many other first-time players on the ballot this year — players like Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius, who earned enormous respect and affection from New York fans; players like Devon White, one of the great defensive players of all time, players like Orel Hershiser, who for a few months in 1988 was as good as anyone has ever been on a baseball field. They’ll all fall off the ballot in time, and eventually they’ll just be dimly remembered figures from the past. Every one of them left the game better than they found it, and every one deserves the time and thought Mark McGwire is now getting.

tmarchman@nysun.com