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BASEBALL HALL OF FAME
MLB

Time may run out for Barry Bonds, but Hall of Fame will be worse off without baseball's home run king

Gabe Lacques
USA TODAY

It is a concept that grew into an expectation and on Tuesday night will likely become reality: Barry Bonds will not be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame – even after other users of performance-enhancing drugs gained entry.

Bonds, one of the top 10 greatest players in the game’s history, remains Major League Baseball’s home run king, hitting 762 in his 22-year career and 73 in 2001, the single-season record. He is a seven-time MVP, so athletic he once stole 50 bases and produced a .970 OPS in the same season, so feared that he’s the all-time leader in both walks and intentional walks.

Heck, in 2004, Bonds drew 120 intentional walks alone – enough to lead all major leaguers in walks in seven of the 14 seasons since his 2007 retirement.

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Yet the capricious prosecution of baseball’s steroid era – and we’ve got a bridge to sell you if you believe the 2007 Mitchell Report is its definitive tome – dictates that the majority who took performance-enhancing substances at a time the game did not punish you for doing so, skirted detection. That it’s a virtual certainty that over the past three decades, a PED user, perhaps many, was elected to the Hall despite denials to the contrary.

Bonds was not as fortunate. His involvement with BALCO – a Bay Area hothouse for designer PEDs – emerged as part of a federal investigation. He tacitly admitted using them in grand jury testimony, claiming ignorance that the substances were performance-enhancing rather than balms and oils to aid his health.

His dodgy testimony resulted in a grand jury indictment – just weeks after playing his final game in 2007 – and eventual acquittal on perjury charges (an obstruction conviction was tossed out). Yet the whole affair, along with his unlikely late-career growth on the stat sheet and in stature were hard to erase from voters’ minds five years later.

Barry Bonds won the NL MVP award seven times in his 22-year career.

That’s when Bonds first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot and received just 36.2% of the vote, far short of the 75% required for induction and a bad indicator for the next 14 years he’d be up for election. Those 14 remaining years became nine when the Hall of Fame cut the number of eligible years on the ballot from 15 to 10 in what certainly seemed like a Roger Clemens-Bonds blocker at the time.

His support has grown as he’s raced the clock, peaking at 61.8% in 2021, but Tuesday night, the clock runs out, with only an unlikely surge of final-year sentiment perhaps pushing him over the top.

Past voting trends say otherwise, even if Bonds’ accomplishments are truly singular.

The case for

Bonds’ dominance is measured not by seasons but centuries, given his place on all-time leaderboards: First among position players in Wins Above Replacement (162.7) and walks (2,558), second, to Hank Aaron, in extra-base hits (1,440), fifth in OPS (1.051) along with his home run crowns. He was a 14-time All-Star, won eight Gold Gloves and his signing by the Giants in 1992 revived a moribund franchise, generating momentum to build their gorgeous bayside park, which Bonds would proceed to fill with his late-career exploits.

It’s truly possible to present three Bonds cases for Hall enshrinement: His pre-BALCO numbers from 1986-1998, his post-PED numbers from 1999-2007 and, of course, the totality of his career.

Early Bonds was a dynamic five-tool force, hitting 411 home runs and stealing 445 bases in his first 13 seasons, posting a 164 adjusted OPS and winning MVP awards in 1990, ’92 and ’93. If Bonds got hit by a proverbial bus after the ’98 season, he’s a Cooperstown lock.

Instead, according to the copiously reported book Game of Shadows, he grew angry, somewhat justifiably, at the attention lavished upon Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa during their now-infamous home run chase. Bonds was pretty good that year, too – 37 homers, a 1.047 OPS and 178 adjusted OPS.

But in the chemically fueled late ‘90s, he was a footnote: Bonds finished eighth in NL MVP voting and his 37 home runs were good for 18th in the major leagues, behind not only McGwire and Sosa but also eventually-outed PED users Jose Canseco, Manny Ramirez, Rafael Palmeiro and Alex Rodriguez.

Bonds, as Game of Shadows reported, decided he’d show the world what an all-time great looks like competing on a level playing field. The results were historic, even as they damaged his legacy.

The case against

Bonds’ late-career surge was the stuff of a bad sci-fi film, where an experiment works a little too well and the subject outperforms even the wildest expectations of the scientists. Bonds reportedly began using PEDs in 1999, when he slugged 34 home runs in just 102 games, but suffered a shoulder injury. According to grand jury testimony and media reports, he joined forces with BALCO co-founder Victor Conte before the 2000 season and, at age 35, found another gear: A career-high 49 home runs in 2000, the record 73 in ’01, followed by 46, 45 and 45-homer seasons the following three seasons, the totals depressed only because the mere sight of Bonds often provoked a four-finger order from the opposing dugout to walk him.

Bonds not only knocked McGwire off the single-season home run perch in ’01, he also drew 177 walks to break Babe Ruth’s single-season record of 170. Bonds would break his own record in ’02 (198) and ’04 (232) as fans waved rubber chickens at opponents mortified to pitch to him.

It was a stunning display of offensive brilliance, in that Bonds might see one pitch to hit in a plate appearance – or a game – and lash it over the fence or into a gap. Of all the league-leading black ink on his resume, no combo is perhaps as impressive as his .370 and .362 batting averages, paired with 198 and 232 walks, in 2002 and ’04, respectively.

Yet Bonds, in a sense, broke baseball, the convergence of a generational talent and a fantastic chemist showing the world what was possible when the two joined forces.

His dominance was widely viewed as a stain on the game. Given that drug testing with penalties would begin during his incredible run, and baseball would slowly detach from the slo-pitch softball ethos of the peak steroid era, you could argue Bonds did the game a favor.

Voting trends

It’s been a long climb from 36.2% for Bonds, with eight- and nine-point jumps in 2016 (to 44.3%) and 2017 (to 53.8%) at least getting him in the election conversation. It’s been more incremental since then, with last year’s 61.8% mark leaving him well short of the roughly 70% required to make last-year elections a fait accompli.

In publicly-revealed ballots on Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame tracker, Bonds has received 77.7% support, which has him set up to fall just short of 75% if past election trends hold. In 2021, Bonds was named on 73.7% of 205 public ballots before the vote was revealed, and just 42.6% of 68 private ballots. A similar gap this year between pre-vote public ballots and post-vote public and private ballots would drop him below the 75% threshold.

Outlook

Bonds never tested positive for PEDs, while David Ortiz did, and Ortiz may yet get in on his first ballot this year, with future election all but assured. And so it goes in the oft-hypocritical world of Hall of Fame voting, where electors, outside forces and the Hall itself can bend and sway to public perception or selective memory.

Bonds is now 57, a grandfather, and still widely respected among his peers as a hitting demigod, even if the older guard will never give him an inch when it comes to his off-field indiscretions.

Perhaps a veterans’ committee will see fit to elect Bonds one day, although the typical committee makeup and its occasionally gobsmacking results don’t necessarily augur well for Bonds, either. It may very well be that a player just a notch below his godfather, Willie Mays, will never have a bust in Cooperstown.

As time goes on, and the totality of Bonds’ accomplishments settle in, it’s not hard to sense the greater loss will be the Hall’s, and not Bonds.

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