Sometime this month, the Baseball Writers Association of America will hold a meeting and vote on the wrong question.

The annual World Series meeting will be devoted to the issue of selling broadcast rights to the BBWAA’s regular-season awards presentations. There are many reasons the membership should reject the idea, not the least of which is the prospect of Toby Keith’s performing between the Cy Young and MVP presentations.

First things first. The BBWAA should be voting on a question it never seems to ask itself: Is it time for an organization of journalists to step into the 21st century and get out of the business of choosing MVPs and selecting Hall of Famers?

The answer to that is a resounding yes. But someone has to ask the question first, and that’s not likely to happen.

The BBWAA has been voting for baseball’s postseason awards since their inception. Once upon a time, perhaps, the ethical issues raised by that didn’t seem like a big deal. Those were the days when writers and players traveled together on trains and drank together, when everything was hunky-dory.

Things aren’t that way anymore, and the ethical issues really are quite clear-cut. There is no good reason for journalists to make the news by selecting award winners, and it is clearly wrong for journalists to award bonus money to players they cover. That’s essentially what happens when players have MVP, Cy Young Award, or rookie-of-the-year incentive clauses in their contracts.

This doesn’t even start to address the anecdotal evidence that some members of the BBWAA have used their votes to gain favor with athletes they cover. That’s a whole other story. The point, though, is that the system is antiquated and ethically indefensible even when it’s working as designed.

And then there is the Hall of Fame.

The BBWAA has been deciding who goes into the Hall since 1936. The process always has been problematic. Writers have been known to snub players they didn’t like or who didn’t cooperate with them. Writers have deliberately left obvious Hall of Famers off their ballots because they wanted to prevent the dreaded unanimous selection. Writers have submitted blank ballots to make it harder for borderline players to get in.

But none of those issues comes close to the one looming on the horizon, and that makes it imperative for the BBWAA to give up its affiliation with the Hall.

You guessed it. The issue is steroids.

Not just steroids, but andro and human growth hormone and “the cream” and “the clear” and whatever other substances have been used over the last 15 to 20 years.

A lot of very questionable achievements are going to come before Hall of Fame voters in the next decade or so. There is no way that supposedly objective journalists should serve as arbiters who legitimize some careers and dismiss others.

Baseball is not in a vacuum here. Last year, a number of newspapers and the Associated Press realized the folly of having media members participate in college football’s ranking system. The AP withdrew permission for the Bowl Championship Series to use its rankings because it was having an impact on which bowls teams went to (and how much money their schools made).

The ethics were clear. The ethics are clear here, too. The BBWAA should change the agenda for this month’s meeting and vote to protect its integrity. Let baseball worry about baseball.