July is the one month on the sports calendar in which baseball is granted the national spotlight by the only sports media corporation that seems to matter in America — ESPN.

The network’s focus is temporarily shifted away from the NFL, albeit on an ephemeral basis until the following month when the football season unofficially commences once again. By Independence Day, the NBA and NHL seasons will have reached their respective completions. Even a lockout-prolonged schedule will not push the Stanley Cup Finals past the last week of June.

There’s a reason that two of the most celebrated events in the marathon that is the Major League Baseball regular season take place over the span of one month.

July presents the best opportunity to host the Midsummer Classic and the Home Run Derby. It’s also the perfect time to stage a weekend-long event aimed at celebrating the game and enshrining baseball’s all-time best into the most historic sports museum in America, which happens to be located within driving distance of Binghamton University in the genial village of Cooperstown, N.Y.

The 2013 Baseball Hall of Fame induction weekend figures to be conspicuously less blithe and populated than any in recent memory. The balloting conducted this past January was the first in nearly 20 years in which no eligible candidate received enough votes from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America to earn election. This is the eighth time in the history of BBWAA balloting that the Hall of Fame voting process has resulted in a shutout.

But the result cannot be considered a victory for the writers in condemning the actions of some of baseball’s most memorable players over the last 30 years, many of whom have been deplored as dopers, liars and cowards.

It’s more of a no-decision.

The baseball writers who intended to send a message to steroid users succeeded in doing so, but who benefits? Certainly not a humble town in rural upstate New York that depends on the economic activity of such an eventful weekend. The fans gain nothing from denying the biggest names in baseball entry into the HOF. The sport is spared no additional embarrassment or bad press.

The problem is that the ballot is currently divided between writers primarily concerned with the performances of players in strict comparison to their contemporaries, and writers who feel that electing any steroid users would be an integral compromise of what the Hall of Fame stands for.

Still, it’s perplexing that a player such as Craig Biggio, who fits the description of a Hall of Famer statistically, and has never been suspected of steroid use, fell short of the 75 percent minimum. Many members of the BBWAA openly oppose plebiscitary balloting under these circumstances, suggesting that a bureaucracy supplants the current method which inhibits cohesion among voters.

By now, the debate has become platitudinous. It’s hard to justify the interdiction of many of the best players in the history of the sport simply because of the era in which they played. It’s also difficult to bestow the greatest honor of a sport to liars and cheaters.

The ballot prefaced an investigation by baseball which remains in its nascent stages and concerns the relationship between Anthony Bosch, the founder of a Miami-based clinic linked to performance-enhancing drugs, and several of Major League Baseball’s most illustrious athletes. The list includes Ryan Braun, Gio Gonzalez, Melky Cabrera and, most notably, Alex Rodriguez.

At this point, it’s clear that drug use is still an issue in the sport, and with many more steroid-infected HOF ballots to be decided in years to come, the disease that the steroid culture has infected baseball with will not easily be remedied.