At the entrance to the National Baseball Hall of Fame's plaque gallery, a sign hangs to help guide museum-goers about what they're about to see. The first paragraph talks about how players are in the hall for "their achievements in the game". The next paragraph states that other areas of the museum "address the totality of his career." The final paragraph ties it all together: "The mission of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is to preserve history, which is what we want to do throughout the museum."
If this is indeed Hall's mission, then today is nothing short of a blatant failure. Barry Bonds, arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history who is undoubtedly deserving of induction, did not reach the 75% threshold in his final year on the writers' ballot. For the past nine years, at least one-third of the baseball writers who adjudicate such cases have found Bond's use of performance-enhancing drugs disqualifying, and no different ruling from the revelation of Tuesday's vote. not expected to give. He is not alone, but Bond's rejection, in particular, is a symbol that all these decades later, baseball is still engaging the PED issue, valuing a lazy, historically ethical referendum on the preservation of history. .
It's hard to decide what's most frustrating. It's probably because there are already players in the hall who have been accused of using PED. Or that the commissioner, whose term covers the entirety of the steroid era, Bud Selig, is self-contained. Or generations of players before Bond, including the Manifold Hall of Famers, popped amphetamines as part of their pregame routines. Or that others awarded bronze presentations include several racists, domestic abusers, and even a player who last year stepped down from Hall's board of directors after a woman accused him of credible sexual misconduct. had resigned.
In fact, it's probably as simple as being in the museum that exists to tell the story of baseball.
The campaign against Bond has been going on for decades, with many groups showing a lack of objectivity and reasoning.
It begins with Major League Baseball and blindly turned to Selig, his office, and the game's manager PED. From there came the duality of riding the steroid wave for new stadiums and big TV deals and exponential revenue growth, while villainizing the people promoting it. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and everyone else made big scapegoats in front of Congress, but the treatment of Bond by the League goes far beyond that. Selig angrily said that Bond was breaking the famous Henry Aarons home record, but placing an asterisk next to Bond's final total of 762 and a single-season record of 73. After the 2007 season, when Bond, at the age of 43, remained one of the best hitters on the planet, not a single team offered him a contract. Even though an arbitrator ruled that it wasn't collusion, it clearly was something: Baseball was telling Bond it wasn't welcome.
The message went to Cooperstown, where that same year, McGwire's candidacy forced the Hall of Fame to consider the question that would dominate the next 15 years: Will voters respect PED users? There was confusion among the writers who decided such things. What did Hall want? Although the organization never advocated for or against players, it could provide some kind of guidance for players who used PEDs. Does the so-called "character clause" - which tells Hall voters to consider a player's "character" as one of six characteristics when considering qualifications - apply to the use of the PED? Or should the writers take into account that these players were present in an environment where cheating was rampant?
It was a moment that Hall could embrace and take the right stand – that as ugly as this history is, not telling the full story of it would be the equivalent of whitewashing this seminal moment in the game. Instead, Hall absconded from his leadership duties – and was punished. "We're telling the story of the steroid era just as we tell the story of any era in baseball, and we tell the story in its simple truth," said Jane Forbes Clark, the hall's longtime president, a decade later. in 2017. "And that's how the museum is going to deal with it."
The simple truth is that Barry Bonds is a tale of the steroid age. He is a player whose material gifts knew no bounds - and whose desire to do something beyond greatness took him where he didn't need to. His greed mirrored the league: the relentless pursuit of bigger, better, more. It's history that demands to be told, and there's no better place to tell it than in the Hall of Fame's Plaque Room.
There's no running away from it, no denying it - not if you're a museum. Yet the closest authors who want some clarity on how to handle PED users are those that Hall ever received in an email written by Joe Morgan in November 2017 and blasted voters by Hall. Had given. "The Hall of Fame Is Special" reads the subject line, and from there, Morgan vomits over 1,000 words of anti-PED propaganda. "Steroid users are not here," wrote Morgan, although he knew they were already there.
Six years before that, when Bonds was getting 36.2% of the vote, Clarke said: "I think the writers are doing a great job." By the time of Morgan's email, that number had risen to 53.8%, and the threat of him and Roger Clemens forming Hall was beginning to feel like it might.
The Baseball Writers Association of America ensured that he would not remain under its watch. Even as support jumped to 61.8% in 2021, nearly two in five writers who cast their ballots saw Bond not as the most fearsome hitter, but as the league and Hall presented him: a Big, anthropomorphic needle-filled icky yak-yak juice.
We should be able to accept that Bond is a traitor, lament his actions and strongly argue that he belongs in Cooperstown anyway. Even those who take the Hall of Fame so seriously that they believe they are protecting it by leaving Bond are bound to admit that the history, the mission of the museum, is complex and frustrating and can be sad.
Messing with history is a dangerous game, especially coming from the group that wrote it. But this is what the BBWAA has done today, and delegates this responsibility to Hall. In December, it will convene its Today's Game era committee, which is tasked with voting on anyone who played from 1988 to 2017 and was overlooked by the writers. This group of 16 voters consisting of Hall of Famers, officials and media members voted to induct Selig in 2017 and two years later selected Harold Baines, who didn't have Hall of Fame numbers but had enough friends on the committee. . in Cooperstown.
Bond should be on the ballot, though if Morgan's letter is any indication, his candidacy is dead upon arrival. Getting 12 out of 16 votes from era committees is hard enough without Celebre for a reason. His name will remain on the ballot — and his fate in the hands of today's sports committee — ad infinitum.
We can spend all the time in the world, wishing it was a less complicated, straightforward, black-and-white, journey of a hero. This doesn't always happen. After all these decades, Shoeless remains Joe Jackson and Pete Rose Pariah; And along with Bond, Clemens and Kurt Schilling, Hall is inviting three more people—the former two to use PED, the latter to say heinous things.
Unlike Jackson and Rose, bonds are not banned. Those who watched the whole process and found it disgusting may continue to stomp for Bond, to suggest that it is probably not in the best interest of the museum that exists to tell baseball history so that For someone to be essentially overlooked for their mission. After so long, Clarke was right: the simple truth is obvious.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame needs to induct Barry Bonds. There are plenty of ingenious solutions that would accomplish Hall's stated mission and recognize that it's possible to convince the player Bond was by mourning the choices he made. It only requires the correct words on the plaque. And since Hall won't be doing it this year, it looked like it was an appropriate time to take a crack.
Barry Lamar Bond
Pittsburgh NL, San Francisco NL, 1986-2007
Baseball's home run king, with 762, won seven MVP awards and scored more runs than any player in history. With a fearsome left-arm swing, set a single-season home run record with 73 and redefined hitting for a generation. The use of performance-enhancing drugs compounded the achievements and became a symbol of MLB's steroid era. Heroes and villains put together, unusual power-speed combinations that, even better than the eye, made N.L. helped lead. 10 times the base percentage.
That's Barry Bonds, and that's how you preserve history.