They never banked on getting caught.  

Never thought we’d all learn to spot the bad guys among the real ballplayers. That we would not see athletes who had become stronger but men who looked like teenaged acne sufferers, freaks with block heads and raging tempers and bloated statistics that did not make sense.

They thought that we were stupid and they were smart and that they would never get caught, as all cheaters do.

And now, what? We’re taking polls to see who will still vote Sammy Sosa into the Hall of Fame?

No. No. And again, no.

No matter his numbers or his raw skill or the magnitude of his career. No matter if he ever admits his sins, but especially because he has not.

We did not do this to Sammy Sosa.

Sosa, revealed in a New York Times report Tuesday to have tested positive in 2003 for performance-enhancing drugs, did this. And no one expressed surprise because as one name fell, and then another and then another, we became experts at detecting cheaters.

All we needed was the proof, and we have it now from a list of 104 players who failed urine tests six years ago that was supposed to determine whether drug-testing would be necessary. Well, it was. And now the “anonymous” list is leaking out one drip at a time.

It stinks for baseball, of course. For all the players who did not cheat and whose careers, like Frank Thomas’ and Harold Baines’, never drew the admiration and honor they should have. When Sosa and Mark McGwire were putting up their insane home run numbers in 1998, we actually bought into it and worse, lauded them for bringing fans back to baseball.

Shame on them

Shame on those of us who are talking about still considering them for baseball’s greatest honor; those of us who have suggested creating a special wing for cheaters in the Hall of Fame.

Could there be a stupider idea? Create a special place in the most sacred temple of the sport for those who have disgraced it the most?

Why do we put athletes into their sports’ Halls of Fame? To make sure they are never forgotten, that they are forever memorialized .

The cheaters do not deserve to be memorialized.

And there isn’t a chance we will ever forget them.

It does not matter if we blew it on bad guys decades ago. We’re smarter now. Smart enough to know all about performance-enhancing drugs. Smart enough to find out who is using them.

Too smart to blow it again. Read Melissa on ESPNChicago.com.