Arlen Specter has nothing on me. I can switch parties, too.

All you’ve gotta do is say, “Mickey Mantle.”

The Mick is why I’ve jumped the aisle on steroids and the baseball Hall of Fame, and maybe you can throw a guy named Zev Chafets in there, too. Chafets is the author of “Cooperstown Confidential,” a history of the Hall. The Mick is … well, everyone knows who he is.

No. 7. Hall of Famer. Juicer.

Yes, that’s right. Mickey Mantle did steroids.

Remember 1961, the year he and Roger Maris chased down the Babe?

If you do, you’ll also remember Mantle sat out a period of time because his quack doctor used a dirty needle on him, causing an abscess on his hip. What you might not know is what was in the needle: steroids and amphetamines.

I learned this while reading Chafets’ piece in this week’s ESPN The Magazine, in which Chafets articulates something that’s been gnawing at me for some time. PEDs, he says, shouldn’t keep Steroids Era players out of the Hall of Fame, because some of their antecedents are already there.

I believe baseball is the product of its times, and if Cooperstown is supposed to be the game’s official chronicler, it can’t ignore the Steroids Era and those who played in it without failing at its task. It’s part of the game’s history. Omitting it, and the players who gave it life, turns the Hall into George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth – which, of course, did not deal in truth at all.

Look, I understand the other side of this. I’ve made its case many times. I also know the Hall’s rules include something called the “integrity clause,” which by definition every juicer from the Steroids Era violated.

But I also know this: The Hall is jammed with players who violated the integrity clause. As Chafets points out, two members (Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby) were members of the Ku Klux Klan. DiMaggio had serious mob connections. Ty Cobb bragged about killing a man and getting away with it; Grover Cleveland Alexander pitched drunk when alcohol was a banned substance.

If you’re going to bar Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, Roger Clemens and who knows how many other juicers/suspected juicers for violating the integrity clause, what do you do about the Speakers and Hornsbys and DiMaggios and Cobbs? What do you do about all the Hall of Famers who used PEDs – including the many players who gobbled amphetamines at a time when they were as common as aspirin in major league clubhouses?

Do you throw all those people out now? And if you don’t, how do you justify it?

Interesting tidbit from Chafets: In 1889 – 1889! – a pitcher named Pud Galvin, looking for an edge, drank monkey testosterone. So this has been going on for awhile.

The difference is, it was pervasive during the Steroids Era. So pervasive, in fact, that I’ve come to believe keeping Steroids Era juicers (or suspected juicers) out of the Hall will be nearly impossible without turning Cooperstown into the Ministry of Truth.

So here’s what should happen: If you think the body of work compiled by Bonds or Clemens or anyone else from the steroids generation makes him Hall-worthy, you vote him in. And on his plaque, you include the notation that “some of (player name here’s) numbers were compiled during the Steroids Era.”

It’s not the whole truth, sadly. But in an era when truth was, and remains, elusive, it will have to do.