(A lot of fathers today would probably prefer their daughters marry the nice heart surgeon, as opposed to Derek Jeter or A Rod...
Rightly or wrongly, players are judged by the standards of the time. I'm not a baseball historian, but I suspect that Pete Rose in the 1920s is a first ballot Hall of Famer. Babe Ruth in the 1980s might have ended up like....Pete Rose.
I suppose that there are some athletes whose legacies are tarnished at that inflection point when standards change and the "everyone else is doing it argument" suddenly fails in the public eye. Lance Armstrong comes to mind, and maybe that also applies to a guy like Barry Bonds.
But I still maintain that Hank Aaron's athletic legacy is far greater than the sum of his statistics. Hank Aaron to me is like Jesse Owens. Carl Lewis may have won more gold medals in the end, but he'll never be Jesse Owens.