“Many of us have come to think that silence will be considered complicity. Or that fans might think we are ok if the standards of election to the Hall of Fame are relaxed, at least relaxed enough for steroid users to enter and become members of the most sacred place in Baseball.”

— Joe Morgan, in his recent letter to Hall of Fame voters

The “most sacred place in Baseball”? Really? Imagine your stereotypical nuclear family taking a tour …

“Hey, look, kids, here’s the plaque for Cap Anson! He was a heck of a hitter, and a pretty good manager, too. Oh, and one more thing: He played a crucial role in implementing institutional racism that kept baseball lily-white from the 1880s until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947.”

“Now check this out, kids! Ty Cobb. The Georgia Peach. A bat for the ages. Also, he was accused of helping to fix a game in 1919, as well as betting on other games.”

“Here’s a relatively new one: Bud Selig. The best commissioner ever. Well, except for when he did reportedly did nothing upon learning of allegations of serious misconduct by his MLB.com rainmaker Bob Bowman, a charge that Selig hasn’t denied. And back as the Brewers’ owner, Selig helped lead three runs of collusion in which teams worked in unity to denigrate their own product.

“Wow, kids! Isn’t this place sacred?”

Enough already with talk of how inducting players who used illegal performance-enhancing drugs will “ruin” the Hall, or “relax” its standards, to use Morgan’s language. To the contrary, the Hall’s only chance of being saved from irrelevance, of gaining acquittal from the serious charge of selective outrage, is for these guys to gain their earned place. For the voters to understand that their mission is not to police player-on-player crimes, but rather to look after the consumer, who has never been impacted one iota by illegal PED usage, yet sure as heck has by crimes personified by Anson, Cobb, Selig and other inductees.

With the official announcement coming Wednesday, here’s my 2018 Hall of Fame ballot. As usual, I used all 10 spots and would’ve included perhaps as many as five more had I been allowed.

He is baseball’s true home run king, both single-season and career. To suggest otherwise is intellectually felonious. Every statistic carries context, none better or worse than the next. Hank Aaron played many home games in Atlanta’s hitter-friendly ballpark. Babe Ruth, thanks to Anson, faced only white pitchers. And so on. You don’t get to cherry-pick Bonds’ context.

Morgan urged us to use the Mitchell Report as a guideline for whom not to elect. Except that Clemens, the star of the Mitchell Report, stunned everyone by challenging the findings on Capitol Hill and, by gaining acquittal from perjury charges, ultimately proving the report didn’t hold up under due process. Clemens’ brilliant career speaks for itself.

He played at a high level for just 11 years, and much of his value came from his phenomenal center field defense that would pass any “eye test” and gets substantiated by the analytics. Combine these realities with the ballot gridlock, and the first-year candidate is at risk of not meeting the 5 percent threshold necessary to be part of next year’s group.

Man, were those Braves teams good. Chipper, a first-year consideration here, is a cinch to join teammates Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz as well as manager Bobby Cox and general manager John Schuerholz in the Hall. He goes down as one of the best at a position, third base, that hasn’t received a great deal of love in Cooperstown. Wade Boggs, in 2005, was the last third baseman to get in on the writers’ ballot.

The ninth-year candidate, who crossed the 50 percent level just last year at 58.6 percent, sits on a pace to pass the required 75 percent mark as per the pre-announcement tracking of Ryan Thibodaux. His monster offense, with a .312/.418/.515 slash line in 8,674 at-bats, makes him the rare designated hitter who overcomes his lack of defensive contributions to deserve immortality.

He’s gaining, too, as per Thibodaux — up over 70 percent — and he’s on a nice track in his fifth try. The key with Mussina is not to focus on what he wasn’t as a pitcher (the Yankees’ “ace” or a 300-win pitcher) and look at what he was (durable, an outstanding 3.58 strikeouts-to-walks ratio). He should be mentioned in the same breath as Glavine and Smoltz.

Another first-year candidate in a deceptively strong freshman class, Rolen shares with Andruw Jones a level of elite defense that often gets overlooked when it doesn’t get accompanied by amazing highlights (as it did with Brooks Robinson and Ozzie Smith, to name two examples). The third baseman played at an All-Star level consistently from 1997-2010 before finally petering out.

Though he’d like me and other journalists to be murdered, a pet cause he advocated last year on Twitter, I’d like him to be immortalized in Cooperstown. Like Mussina, he struck out far more than he walked, with a 4.38 K-to-BB ratio. And his already sublime work became even better in the postseason.

Like Chipper, he’s a slam-dunk to get elected in his first year here. Like Chipper, he’s wholly deserving. 612 home runs and a 147 OPS+? Yes, please.

In his eighth year, the Canadian has climbed from 21.9 percent in 2017 to about 40 percent at the moment, which is nice but still far away from enshrinement. If you scrutinize his numbers, you see that though his time with the Rockies provided a huge boost, he’s not a Coors Field creation. He could hit — and run — anywhere.

I took Manny Ramirez off, after supporting him last year, because I thought he ranked 11th among this group. I also believe that Vladimir Guerrero, Gary Sheffield and Sammy Sosa are Hall of Famers.

For all of the love given to Omar Vizquel, another defensive whiz, his 82 OPS+ shows how below-average offensively he was. I’d vote for Billy Wagner over Trevor Hoffman, yet ultimately I don’t think either is a Hall of Famer. Johan Santana? If only he could’ve produced one or two more seasons at an All-Star level. Same goes for Jeff Kent. Johnny Damon goes down as one of his generation’s most entertaining personalities … and not quite good enough for the Hall.