St. Louis ? Big Mac was easy.

Even under the well-insulated cover of his self-imposed exile, Mark McGwire was a target baseball’s Hall of Fame voters couldn’t possibly miss. The lash of their outrage (or was it the sting of their unbearable disappointment?) flogged Big Mac’s once-heroic reputation with a stunning vengeance Tuesday afternoon.

When the results for the Baseball Hall of Fame class of 2007 were announced, McGwire – once considered a national hero, now a larger-than-life symbol of baseball’s steroids era – was excluded by a staggering 76.5 percent of the electorate.

Striking out at symbols is easy. Chopping down institutions is a much more labor-intensive exercise. So it remains to be seen if what happened Tuesday was a forceful statement by the overwhelming majority of the Baseball Writers’ Association or just a convenient show of fleeting temperance.

Keeping Big Mac out of Cooperstown in his first year of eligibility goes under the category of “Dog bites man.” It wasn’t exactly shocking news. It was precisely the right thing to do, striking down the first known (or widely suspected) drug cheat of the steroids era who became eligible for the Hall.

So what’s the follow-up act to this stunning performance by three-quarters of the eligible voting members of the Baseball Writers’ Association who left the box next to McGwire’s name blank on their ballots?

I want to know what they’ll do next.

I want to know whether they’re really up to the task of editing out some of the suspicious pages of baseball’s history books, or whether they’re merely playing around. I want to know whether they will continue to ignore Mc-Gwire – and all the other tainted contemporaries who will soon follow – by such an overwhelming majority. Or will that 23.5 percent “yes” vote continue to increase in large percentages so rapidly that we’ll soon look back at this year as a grandstanding farce?

I want to know: Where do they go from here?

McGwire is only the first of many to come, and they should all bear the same scrutiny, no matter if their names are Sosa, Palmeiro, Clemens or Bonds. If there is an obvious cloud of suspicion looming over them, the best response is to leave their ballot box blank until there is enough evidence to either indict them or exonerate them.

Voting against McGwire for one year was easy. But what do you do next year and the year after that?

Some have hinted that this year’s “no” vote was in fact a temporary thing. Some voters believe they’ll “make him pay” by ignoring him for one or two or 10 years, then reluctantly let him slide in, as if that punishment fits his crime. This is one of the silliest exercises of all, because I don’t recall ever seeing one Hall of Fame plaque inscribed with the notation, “Oh, this guy isn’t a real Hall of Famer because he didn’t get into Cooperstown until after the fifth year on the ballot.”

Last time I checked, I don’t recall any special wing just for first-year electees. You’re either a Hall of Famer or you’re not.

Institutionally, the entire baseball community has dropped this whole unpleasant mess into sports writers’ laps. “I don’t think it’s my place to cast judgment,” new Hall inductee Cal Ripken told reporters on his national conference call.

“Those are issues you guys are going to have to sort out – I don’t have to deal with that one,” said Tony Gwynn, Ripken’s ’07 classmate.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.