Barry Bonds – No HOF For You

So the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot has come out.  On the 22nd of this month we will find out if anyone gets the 75% needed for induction into Cooperstown.  And a few former players will get one final shot.  If I was a baseball voter, they would not get my vote.  And they won't get it from the sportswriters either.  Roger Clemens is one of them, and the other...

Barry Bonds

Last year Barry Bonds got 61.8 % of the vote.  It is not likely he will jump up from that percentage to the 75% needed.  Some will argue that he was a Hall of Fame player before he started taking steroids.  Perhaps.  But he has always denied using performance enhancing drugs (even though it was SO obvious, I mean his HEAD went up 3 hat sizes) and it will keep him out, despite having the record for most career home runs and most in a season.

St Louis Cardinal fans will remember Mark McGuire.   He used performance enhancers.  And he and Sammy Sosa saved baseball in the summer of 1998.  Mark came clean, and even though he will not be in the Hall, he is back in baseball.  Sammy has not come clean, and has been shunned by baseball and by the Chicago Cubs.  Barry still claims he "didn't knowingly" do them.  BS.

Barry has a few things going against him.  He was never very good to the sportswriters.  Did he have to be?  No...but you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and he was often a jerk.  Baseball sport writers have long memories, and can hold a grudge.  And they vote.  He also broke Hank Aaron's record (fraudulently) and would have come nowhere close to doing so if he wasn't juiced.

Perhaps the Veterans Committee will eventually put him in.  Clemons too.  But he won't get voted in.  He may not care.  I think he does, but he will not admit it.  The Hall of Fame is for the best of the best in baseball.  He could have been, but he took a short cut.  And that will keep him out.  And it should.