Barry Bonds has a career WAR of 162.4. Barry Bonds holds the Major League Baseball record for most home runs in a single season (73) and in a career (762). Barry Bonds won a record seven Most Valuable Player awards. Barry Bonds drove in one fewer run with just home runs (1,174) than Hall of Famer Craig Biggio did in his entire career (1,175).
All of those sentences justify Bonds’ induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame on their own. Together, they are just five facts that don’t even begin to cover the ridiculousness of his 22-year career. But Barry Bonds isn’t in the Hall of Fame, unlike Biggio. In fact, after this week it’s more likely than ever that Bonds will never be inducted into Cooperstown.
Jim Thome, Vlad Guererro, Chipper Jones and Trevor Hoffman all made the cut. Bonds finished eighth, with 238 votes out of a necessary 317 for induction. In his sixth year on the ballot, Bonds moved from 53.8 percent to 56.4 percent. It’s simply not enough momentum, statistically, to think Bonds gets over the threshold in his four remaining years on the ballot.
The absurdity of this grows each year, but the outrage becomes more muted with time and acceptance that Bonds’ sins will be punished with a calculated attempt to forget all that he accomplished. Consider, for a moment, just the numbers in the first paragraph of this story. Maybe you don’t care about WAR, or even understand it. That’s fine, know this: Bonds is fourth all-time in the history of baseball. Yes, the entire sport. First place is Babe Ruth. Oh, and then there’s this.
Reminder that Barry Bonds' career WAR was higher than Chipper Jones' and Jim Thome's put together.
— Grant Brisbee (@GrantBrisbee) January 25, 2018
Getting mad about Barry Bonds is a now-annual tradition for woke baseball fans each January. It is, simply put, re-god-damn-diculous that the greatest slugger of all time is not in the place where great baseball players get bronze plaques.
Yes, yes. I know. BALCO. And other great players aren’t in there, either. Pete Rose and whatnot. Cheating and gambling and the sanctity of the game. Without rules this life is chaos, and the rules state that the Professional Baseball Writers Association of America decides who gets to go to Cooperstown. The writers, it seems, were never very fond of Barry Bonds. And using steroids in baseball has been declared a more serious a crime than in other sports, so Bonds is out.
It's as irresponsible to say that a player 'did it clean' as to say, without proof, that someone used PEDs. Because reporters can't know who was clean and who wasn't. You can only say 'He was never implicated' or 'He was never linked.'
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) January 24, 2018
But is it too easy to say I don’t care? Because I don’t. I used to. And then I realized that punishments for steroid use were entirely arbitrary, and the biases of sportswriters does not eliminate the greatness of Bonds. Besides, the steroid argument in baseball has become so obtuse it’s not even worth taking a side: Was he caught? Was he merely suspected of steroid use? Can you ban someone just for assuming he did something, even if he wasn’t on the Mitchell Report or discussed in BALCO testimony?
Bonds’ exclusion from Cooperstown arguably puts him atop the list of greatest players ever to be left out of the Hall, and it’s a list that grows larger as the years go on. Manny Ramirez is a fringe Hall of Famer for some, but he was another dominant slugger that was beleaguered by steroid accusations late in his career that won’t get close to getting in. Put him on the now-growing pile that will likely include 300-game winner Roger Clemens, who is essentially the pitcher version of Bonds with regards to voting on the current ballot, too.
Rose used to be the exception, a side show created out of penance for something rare. His absence was a pregnant pause, a notable difference between the record books and those allowed inside the Hall itself. By the time the Steroid Era is excluded from Cooperstown they’ll have enough players to create a satellite Hall of Fame out of those shunned.
(Oh, and by the way: The man who presided over the entire Steroid Era, Bud Selig? He was inducted into the Hall of Fame last year.)
Alex Rodriguez will be the next big test of this Steroid Era prohibition. And maybe he will get in. Probably not, though. A-Rod’s public relations pivot has happened quicker than Bonds’, but it’s not the public that needs convincing here.
https://twitter.com/lindseyadler/status/956188521080946688
No major sport has had quite the existential crisis about drug use as baseball, and it’s seeped into the inherent biases of baseball writers to become the Most Important Issue of our sporting times. Baseball has created a place where those biases are essentially held sacred. Bonds got caught and writers wanted an excuse to punish him in the first place. They have the power to do so, and so they will.
But at this point, there is an entire generation of adult baseball fans who were taught that using steroids and HGH in baseball is cheating when they were younger. Now they barely care. The suspensions still come, but the hand-wringing is over. Last season, Major Leaguers hit more home runs than ever before, a 495-dinger increase over the previous year. Drugs were never considered the cause. In fact, everyone seemed to blame the balls.
Perhaps restricting those deserving enshrinement makes it somehow more American these days. Maybe it adds to the proud tradition of exclusion in baseball, somehow as a good thing. But in its rigidity, it shows the flaws of not just the Hall of Fame, but baseball itself. So baseball’s hallowed Hall will punish its best for something fans no longer care about. Fine.
But don’t pretend a design flaw is a feature here. Saying Bonds doesn’t belong alongside baseball’s best ever doesn’t make Cooperstown a more attractive vacation destination. It just shows how far the game still is behind reality, and the America that continues to wonder what the game has to offer those most dedicated to it.
