Baseball-ocks

I came back to baseball at the end of college after a decade of not caring. I spent the nineties playing Rotisserie, knowing which team had the best fourth outfielder, the best set-up man. I remember Hank Aaron breaking the Babe's record, I remember Big Mac breaking Maris'. When it comes to baseball I am old-school, somewhere to the right of Bob Costas. I can't stand the DH or the wildcard, I look down on the American League as a whole, and I loathe the Yankees and the Red Sox almost equally.
I also really hate cheating.
Baseball is a different game. It's a team sport but one where the individual contributions stand out more than the team's efforts in many cases. The other major sports don't have this strange distortion. Collective accomplishments echo through history; the Whiz Kids, Murderer's Row, The Gashouse Gang, but no other sport worships its individual excellence the way baseball does. Year by year, career by career, baseball history is built of an ever-growing mountain of numbers put up by single players.
This is why football players can get caught using steroids, get suspended for four games or whatever, and it just blows over, but baseball players can't. Every point of batting average, every dinger, every K a pitcher throws matters because it gets built into the flying buttresses of the cathedral of baseball. It ornaments it as well as supporting it.
Here is what I think:
Barry Bonds is a cheating scumbag. Raphael Palmeiro is a cheating scumbag. Andy Petitte is a cheating scumbag, as is Jason Giambi. Rumors were floating around about Roger Clemens years before the Mitchell report came out. Is he a cheating scumbag? I'm fairly confident that he is, but that's opinion. I think Mark McGuire was a cheating scumbag. I think the record should be Maris'. I think the Mitchell report is the tip of the iceberg.
So what do we do about that?
I have been hearing lately that the prevalence of steroids in baseball means we should just throw up our hands, ignore it, and move on. Like it's not an uneven playing field, its just differently even. Don't asterisk any records, don't keep anybody out of the Hall of Fame, just wink and move on.
Bullshit.
One of the big arguments for this position is that how can you punish some and not others? Fine. Punish 'em all. No records count from the steroid era, nobody gets in the hall of fame (except maybe Tony Gwynn, don't try to tell me HE was on the juice...). Does this punish innocent players? Yeah, it does. So what? They were part of the culture, as far as I'm concerned they let it happen.
Too much of baseball is its history. Too much of its mystique is the trail of numbers disappearing into the past.
These cheaters have damaged baseball. I am drifting farther and farther away from a game that I used to really love.