If your stance on PED users is "I don't care at all, players should be inducted solely on their performance" then Manny, Sosa, McGwire and Palmeiro should all clearly be in the Hall and Sheffield probably should as well.
I don't care about PED usage at all on this issue, and if I had a vote I don't think I'd cast one for any of those guys except Manny and maybe McGwire. All 5 were middle of the order bats whose case was made on hitting, they weren't expected to be anything more than "not an embarrassment" in the field. So on that count:
Career WAR, WAR7, JAWS:
Palmeiro 71.9, 38.9, 55.4 (20 yrs)
Ramirez: 69.3, 39.9, 54.6 (19 yrs)
McGwire 62.2, 41.9, 52.0 (16 yrs)
Sosa 58.6, 43.8, 51.2 (18 yrs)
Sheffield 60.5, 38.0, 49.3 (22 yrs)
Sheffield and Sosa's JAWS are meaningfully below their
Jpos (57.2), McGwire slightly below his (54.8), Ramirez and Palmeiro narrowly above theirs.
Bill James HOF Monitor (likely HOFer = 100) and
HOF Standards (average HOFer = 50):
Ramirez 226 (#34), 69 (#17)
Sosa 202 (#44), 52 (#77)
Palmeiro 178 (#59), 57 (#47)
McGwire 170 (#69), 42 (#142)
Sheffield 158 (#80), 61 (#30)
All 5 are considered "likely", but Manny clearly stands out on these measures. If he had just thrown in the towel in 2009* rather than trying to cheat to come back, I think he'd be inducted this year if not perhaps previously. On the other hand, leaving baseball is clearly not something Manny has ever contemplated - he's
still trying to play, at age 48, having been signed as player-coach of a team in Auckland NZ earlier this year.
Career OPS+:
McGwire: 163
Ramirez 154
Sheffield 140
Palmeiro 132
Sosa 128
Career Home Runs: (why not, chicks dig the long ball)
Sosa 609 (#9 all-time)
McGwire 583 (#11)
Palmeiro 569 (#13)
Ramirez 555 (#15)
Sheffield 509 (#26)
The only eligible people above Sheffield on the career HR list who aren't in the HOF, besides these 5, is Bonds. Everyone else is either not yet eligible (A-Rod, Pujols, Ortiz) or in the HOF. Below Sheffield you've got McGriff (#28), Delgado (#34), and Canseco and Adam Dunn (tied #37);
everyone else in the career top 40 is either in or not yet eligible. I don't have a strong point to make about their candidacy with that, just that historically putting up those kind of HRs marked you a shoo-in and now it seems the opposite is true.
Anyway, the
2014 ballot is instructive: Frank Thomas got elected with 83.7%, in a year when McGwire got 11%, Sosa 7%, and Palmeiro fell off with 4.4%. That is a VAST gap in perceived worthiness, and given Bonds / Clemens' support in the 60s, I don't think we can chalk the difference up solely to strongly-held beliefs about PEDs. Say what you will about Manny, he's been well ahead of those support numbers, in the 20s every year, with last year jumping to 28%.
* No, I'm not still bitter at all about Theo unloading him for Jason Bay in 2008. We did just fine without him, it's not like we could've used him in a very close 7-game series against the Rays or anything.