It would have been if those eligible had allowed their natural ability to carry the day.

Barry Bonds never needed steroids to be great. It was already in his genes, and the numbers he put up before he suddenly grew larger than life would have been enough to make him a first-ballot choice the moment he was eligible.

Roger Clemens already had four Cy Young Awards and an MVP by the time his former personal trainer said he started injecting the pitcher with human growth hormone an accusation Clemens vehemently denies to this day but one that will taint him forever.

Sammy Sosa might have gotten in even without the cartoonish home run totals he and Mark McGwire put up beginning in the late 1990s.

They're all on the ballot released Wednesday by the Hall of Fame, ready to be judged for the first time by more than 600 longtime members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. They need 75 percent of the vote to be enshrined among the greats of the past.

And they're not going to get it.

Not this year, anyway. Not with the Steroids Era still looming over Major League Baseball.

The guardians of the game stand in their way, ready to do something Bud Selig and the rest of baseball refuse to do hold players responsible for soiling the sport. Enough writers will take a stand so that Bonds and Clemens will at least have to wait and Sosa may never get in at all.

The bottom line is that numbers define the Hall of Fame. Always have, ever since the Babe gained entry with his 714 home runs and Cobb got in at the same time with 4,191 hits.

The numbers among this generation don't add up.

Believe, if you want, that Bonds hit 73 home runs in a year without the help of modern chemistry. Fans in San Francisco certainly did, at least until an attorney for Bonds admitted in court that the player took steroids but did so unwittingly.

They suspended disbelief at Wrigley Field, too, while home runs flew off Sosa's bat and he dueled with McGwire to obliterate the single-season home run record held for so long by Roger Maris. And Houston fans surely tried to buy that Clemens finished with the best ERA of his career (1.87) at age 43 because he was a workout fiend.

But the folks who vote for the Hall of Fame are a bit more cynical than the average Joe. They've been around baseball long enough to know that crazy stats are just that if they haven't been seen in the previous 100 years.

Some voters aren't comfortable being judge and jury when baseball itself has no intention of changing anyone's numbers or records. The facts of who might have taken what and when or didn't will always be in dispute, so they'll rely on just the numbers in making their decisions.

Others won't, because what they saw still disturbs them greatly, no matter the denials. They've rejected McGwire six times now, and they'll vote to reject Bonds, Clemens and Sosa in their first try to get in.

"Nay on all three," said Mike Klis of The Denver Post. "I think in all three cases, their performances were artificially enhanced. Especially in the cases of Bonds and Clemens, their production went up abnormally late in their careers."

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a member of the BBWAA, though I don't have a vote for this year's class because there's a 10-year membership minimum. If I did, I would carefully look at the numbers for all the players and the impact they had on the game.

Then I would crumple up the ballot and toss it in the trash.

That might not be fair to Craig Biggio, another first-timer on the ballot who was never suspected of taking steroids. But he's in the 3,000-hit club, so his time will come.

I like Mike Piazza, too, but if the numbers of others in his era can't be believed, can his? And I don't believe Curt Schilling is a Hall of Famer; his bloody sock shouldn't be there, either.

If this ballot is an uncomfortable one for baseball, Selig and his cohorts have no one to blame but themselves. They were silent as players became bloated caricatures of themselves. They did nothing but cheer as records that stood the test of time were erased in the space of a few seasons.

They and the baseball players' union had to be publicly shamed before even acknowledging that steroids had made the game a joke much less finally doing something about it.

If you're debating the fairness of it all, consider that the most prolific hitter in the history of the game, Pete Rose, wasn't even allowed on the Hall of Fame ballot because he bet on baseball. Yet McGwire has been on it even though he was an admitted steroid user, and Bonds remains the sport's all-time home run king as well as a nominee this year.

My guess is Bonds and Clemens will one day be in the Hall of Fame. Years will pass and their numbers will become more acceptable as the steroid era recedes into the background.

Let's hope that day doesn't come anytime soon.

____

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org or http://twitter.com/timdahlberg

The demonstrations the largest turnout of Morsi supporters since he came to office in June were seen as a test of strength for Islamists seeking to counteract mass opposition protests denouncing the president's decision to seize near absolute power and the fast-tracking of the draft charter by an Islamist-led assembly ahead of a Constitutional Court decision on Sunday on whether to dissolve the panel.

Morsi says he acted to prevent courts led by holdovers from Hosni Mubarak's ousted regime from delaying a transition to democracy. But his decision last week to put himself above judicial oversight has plunged the country into turmoil and mobilizedan increasingly cohesive opposition leadership of prominent liberal and secular politicians a contrast to the leaderless youth uprising last year that toppled Mubarak.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical Salafi groups organized Saturday's protests a day after the opposition in a bid to avoid conflict and violence after days of street skirmishes between protesters from both sides.

"The people support the president's decision!" chanted crowds outside Cairo University, where tens of thousands had gathered by midday. They held posters that read "Yes to stability" and "Yes to Islamic law." Protests in other parts of Egypt were expected to also attract large crowds in the evening. The rallies were dubbed "Shariyya and Shariah," Arabic for "legitimacy and Islamic law."

Members of the assembly, who wrote the charter and approved it in a 16-hour long voting session it just after dawn Friday, were expected to hand to Morsi the final draft later Saturday. The president is then expected to set a date for a nationwide referendum on the document, possibly in mid-December.

Morsi's spokesman Yasser Ali said the president's meeting with the panel members will be televised. State TV also announced the president would speak later Saturday.

"There is no constitution that is 100 percent approved. It is a step in the direction of achieving national goals," Ali said.

Responding to questions about the expected ruling Sunday, Ali said Morsi's decrees giving his decision immunity from judicial review were issued after the court sessions were scheduled.

"At the end of the day, we will respect court rulings but we are sure that everyone will triumph to the national interests," he said, without elaborating.

The speeding of the constitutional draft through the assembly, despite a boycott by secular and Christians, was seen as an attempt to circumvent a legal challenge that threatened to dissolve the panel and delay the charter.

The assembly, which worked on the draft for months, has been marred by dispute, with liberal, secular and Christian members quitting in protest of what they call the Islamists' hijacking of the process.

The constitutional court ruled in June to dissolve parliament's Islamist-dominated lower chamber on grounds that the law governing the elections didn't provide equal opportunities for candidates, and it was ruling on the constitutional assembly on Sunday.

It's not clear, though, what the standing of the court's ruling would be since Morsi granted himself near absolute powers last week that deemed his decisions above judicial oversight.

The Islamists point to the fact that Morsi was Egypt's first freely elected president and argue that the liberals and activists do not represent the vast majority of Egyptians.

As protesters marched over a bridge leading to the gathering, they chanted: "The people want to implement God's laws." Others chanted: "Oh God, make Morsi victorious."

Ashraf Metawli, a 32-year-old government employee from the Nile Delta province of el-Menoufia, said the majority of Egyptians are Muslims and its constitution should be an Islamist one.

"This is our belief. We picked the president for Islamic law, and our choice was democratic," he said. "What Morsi is doing is to get rid of all that is corrupt."

Ibrahim Galal, a 21-year student, said Tahrir protesters are mobilized largely by members of the old regime who are in opposition to Morsi.

"If it's about numbers, we too can mobilize. Let the ballot box speak. Not everyone can speak for the people," he said.

"Why are you afraid of the (ballot) box!" chanted crowds in the pro-Morsi rally Saturday.

Tens of thousands of Morsi supporters gathered in Cairo but stayed away from the central Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the anti-Mubarak revolution and the site of the opposition protests, drawing up to 200,000 people on Friday, vowing to bring down the draft constitution and demanding Morsi repeal his decrees. Some judges groups have announced strikes until the decrees are repealed.

In the northern Mediterranean city of Alexandria, hundreds of riot police were deployed to create a buffer between several thousand pro and anti-Morsi protesters, who had clashed Friday.

Near Cairo University, dozens of Brotherhood buses stood parked after transporting people from outside the capital to the rally. Thousands others arrived on foot, chanting in support of Morsi as they marched.

"Our message to seculars and liberals... this is the real million-man protest," said ultraconservative Salafi Nour Party leader Yasser Borhani to the crowd in Cairo atop an erected stage.

Later, another popular Salafi Sheik Mohammed Hassan told the crowd that the gathering is designed to protect the Islamic identity of the country and the constitution. "I say we only came here to be a testimony to our Islam and to defend our nation," he said to chants of "God is Great."

"We assure all Egyptians, even Christians, Islam is our religion, Egypt is our nation, and dialogue is our way," he said.

The Brotherhood had originally said it would hold Saturday's rally in Tahrir but changed the location to avoid confrontation. The group said it canceled its rally in the southern city of Luxor after clashes between rival camps broke out there Friday.

Clashes sparked by the two-week old crisis have left two dead and hundreds injured.

The rival street demonstrations highlight the sharp divisions in Egypt nearly two years after the uprising that united and galvanized much of the country to oust Mubarak.

The Brotherhood and more conservative Islamists came out the biggest winners, securing nearly 75 percent of the seats in last winter's parliamentary election before the body was dissolved by a court ruling. But liberals highlight the fact that Morsi, the Brotherhood's candidate, won only 25 percent of votes in the first round of presidential elections. He went on to win the runoff by just over 50 percent, after a divisive race against a former regime figure.

The opposition is considering a number of options, including boycotting the referendum, an intensified street campaign of protests and civil disobedience. Some acknowledge that the opposition does not have enough time or reach to launch a campaign to encourage people to vote against the charter in time.

___

Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb contributed to this report.

Thehas a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns and is located inside the galaxy NGC 1277 in the constellation Perseus. It makes up about 14 percent of its host galaxy's mass, compared with the 0.1 percent a normal black hole would represent, scientists said.

"This is a really oddball galaxy," said study team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin in a statement. "It's almost all . This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems."

The giant black hole is about 11 times as wide as the orbit of Neptune around our sun, researchers said. The mass is so far above normal that the scientists took a year to double-check and submit their research paper for publication, according to the study's lead author, Remco van den Bosch.

"The first time I calculated it, I thought I must have done something wrong. We tried it again with the same instrument, then a different instrument," van den Bosch, an astronomer at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, told SPACE.com. "Then I thought, 'Maybe something else is happening.'" []

Galactic evolution questioned

The finding may have implications for our understanding of   in the center of galaxies.

Astronomers typically believe that the size of the central part of a galaxy, and the black hole inside of it, are linked. But the vastly different proportions seen in NGC 1277 are calling that into question.

NGC 1277's black hole is many times more massive than its largest known competitor. It makes up about 59 percent of its host galaxy's central mass. The object's closest competitor is in the galaxy NGC 4486B, whose black hole takes up 11 percent of the central galaxy's mass.

 However, van den Bosch's team says it has also spotted five other galaxies near NGC 1277 that look about the same, and may also harbor gigantic black holes inside of them.

"You always expect to find one sort [of a phenomenon], but now we have six of them," van den Bosch said. "We didn't expect them, because we do expect the black holes and the galaxies to influence each other."

The research is detailed in tomorrow's (Nov. 29) edition of the journal Nature.

Black hole census

Van den Bosch said his team discovered the mega black holes during a survey to seek "the biggest black holes we could find."

The astronomers analyzed the light coming from 700 galaxies, using an immense light-gathering telescope: the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the University of Texas at Austin's .

From that large survey, they found six galaxies with stars and other objects whipping about inside of them at unusually high average speeds more than 218 miles a second (350 kilometers). The galaxies also were small, at less than 9,784 light-years across.

Suspecting the speed and size measurements meant massive black holes lay inside these galaxies, the team usedarchival data of NGC 1277 and discovered the large black hole.

The team also noted that NGC 1277 has only old stars inside it. The youngest stars in the galaxy are 8 billion years old, almost twice the age of our sun.

Van den Bosch said he is curious to know if these large black holes only formed in the early years of the universe.

"It could just be this thing has been sitting around since the Big Bangand not done much since then," he said. "It might be a relic of what star formation and galactic formation looked like at that time."

The MacDonald Observatory's StarDate night sky publication has an encyclopedia of black holes here:

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