The two players voted into the Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America were formally inducted today in Cooperstown, New York.

Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza had long and productive careers and their numbers indicate they deserve a place in baseball’s ranks of immortals.

But my personal recollections of the two of them mostly diverge.

–A sense of joy and ease highlighted Griffey’s playing style, and I also felt a small bit of personal ownership in his career.

–As opposed to the memories of the effective but somewhat crude slugging by the stiff-limbed Piazza — who also blamed Vin Scully (!) for Dodgers fans turning against him in 1997.

First, Griffey,

“Junior”, as he was often known, began his first full season as a professional in San Bernardino, California, where I spent my youth as a sports journalist.

On opening night of 1988 I went to Fiscalini Field, the ballpark where the local California League team played, and saw the 19-year-old centerfielder hit a home run as the Spirit won, 5-4.

Expectations were high for Griffey, the first pick in the 1987 draft, by Seattle, and in 58 games with San Bernardino he certainly lived up to them — to the tune of a .338 batting average in 256 at-bats, a .431 on-base percentage and a massive 1.007 OPS mark.

This came with 50 runs and 42 RBI for the Single-A team, with 13 doubles, three triples and 32 steals.

He clearly was too good for the league and at the all-star break he was promoted to Double-A Vermont, where he played only 17 games because of an injury.

The following spring he stuck with the Mariners — for whom he pretty much tore it up for 11 seasons as a great all-around player.

He moved to his hometown Cincinnati Reds in 2000, where he played until 2008, then had a cameo with the Chicago White Sox and two more seasons with the Mariners, retiring in 2010 with 630 big-league homers, sixth on the all-time list behind Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Alex Rodriguez and Mays.

He is the first player to enter the Hall as a Mariner, and he is the first Hall-of-Famer to have played professionally for a San Bernardino team. (The town still has a Cal League franchise.)

Griffey was so much fun to watch in part because he seemed to be having fun himself — he pretty much invented the backwards-cap look — and so much of what he did seemed effortless.

He was a glider on the basepaths and in the outfield, and his left-handed swing was the epitome of ease — even when he was sending balls into the seats.

He also left the impression — and we will never know particulars about this — that he was a “clean” ballplayer through the Steroids Era. Never failed a drug test. Never was connected with any of the sketchy “doctors” or clinics that sprang up from about 1990 and well into the following decade.

Then there was Piazza.

He began his Dodgers career three seasons after Griffey — despite being a year older — because he was a 62nd-round draft choice in 1988. The Dodgers took him only on the urging of manager Tommy Lasorda, who knew Piazza’s family.

Piazza had to fight his way up the minor-league system, spending nearly four full years in the minors before he got a whiff of the bigs at the end of 1992.

He joined the team full-time in 1993 and was a sensation. The 35 homers, certainly, the .932 OPS. He was Rookie of the Year as well as a great story — the draft-day afterthought, Lasorda’s guy, who slugged his way to the majors and to stardom.

Plus, he was a catcher, albeit not a very good one — which didn’t much matter because he was killing the ball.

He was the runner-up for the MVP award in both 1996 and 1997, but then things began to go wrong, in Los Angeles.

His contract expired after the 1998 season, and he apparently turned down an offer of $76 million over six years, which would have made him the highest-paid player in the game.

Then comes an very odd bit of the story, in which Piazza blames Scully for turning fans against him, during the 1998 season — a charge the arm’s-length broadcaster found mind-boggling.

Most accounts suggest that by midseason the cash-strapped Dodgers of Peter O’Malley — soon to give way to corporate owners — figured they could not sign Piazza and needed to trade him to get any value for him, eventually sending him to the Florida Marlins for several of players, led by Gary Sheffield, Bobby Bonilla, Todd Zeile and Charles Johnson.

Piazza was with the New York Mets a week later, and stayed for seven-plus seasons, still hitting a ton. But he never got over his issues with the Dodgers, and he made clear he wanted to go into the Hall in a New York Mets uniform, which rankled Dodgers fans a bit, considering their team gave the gawky youngster a chance.

Two other aspects of Piazza leave me a little unsettled.

He was an awkward player. Stiff and muscle-bound. He had none of Griffey’s grace. He was a bit of an automaton, at the plate. If you got a ball in his wheelhouse, he would drive it over the fence — often to the opposite field, with astonishing ease.

Which was a contributing factor in the next bit — that the whiff of drugs was around him.

To be sure, he never failed a test, but this story on mlb.com notes that suspicions were out there and probably hurt him as he failed to reach the 75-percent-of-the-vote threshold in his first three years of eligibility for the Hall of Fame — 2012, 2013, 2014.

This year, Piazza jumped to 83 percent of the vote, and sailed in, but it also was the first year of a smaller, younger voting body, which perhaps finds less fault with drugs or rumors of drugs, or has less anger because many of them did not work through the Steroids Era, and all its betrayals.

(Though Bobby Bonds, Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, all closely linked to PED abuse, remain out, appearing on only 44.3, 12.3 and 7 percent of the ballots, respectively.)

Griffey, meanwhile, was named on 437 of 440 ballots, breaking the HOF record  (previously held by Tom Seaver), with 99.3 percent of the vote.

I had a Hall of Fame vote for something like 15 years, giving it up in 2010, when I was in Abu Dhabi.

How would I have voted this time?

Griffey, for sure. Instantly. He would have been the first name marked on my ballot.

Piazza?

No.

I would have thought about it long and hard, but I would have come back to the notion that if others linked to drugs are being overlooked — led by Bonds — can I close my eyes and vote Piazza?

Probably not. Though I would not have been angry at how this has turned it. A little disappointed, but not agitated.

Piazza had the numbers — he hit 427 homers, most among players who spent most of their careers at catcher. To my knowledge he never failed a drugs test.

He just leaves me a little leery, and compared to the man who gained the Hall with him, well, Griffey is one big bundle of baseball joy.