Clemens, Bonds still low and outside
Cooperstown chances in 2018 appear to be slim and none while Guerrero’s hopes rise
A year ago, a change of heart among Baseball Hall of Fame voters gave a boost to the drug-tarnished candidacies of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, although it did not win them induction, or even get them that close.
Now, with a little more than onethird of the ballots for the class of 2018 already made public, Bonds and Clemens do not appear to be picking up any new converts from established voters, which strongly suggests they will fall substantially short of induction this time as well.
However, it also appears that they continue to make strides through the evolution of the hall of fame electorate, with newly eligible voters inclined to back their candidacies. And as those ballots are being cast, other voters, many of them older and less inclined to support Bonds and Clemens, are losing their voting eligibility and coming off the rolls.
Whether this gradual evolution will eventually pull Bonds and Clemens close to the 75 per cent of the vote needed for induction remains to be seen. But they do not have much time, because they are already in their sixth year of a maximum of 10 years of eligibility.
After that, if they are not inducted, their candidacies can be periodically voted on by the veterans committee, where they may or may not find sympathy for their cause.
Baseball journalists make up the voting bloc for the hall of fame, and the final vote totals will be announced on Jan. 24, with Chipper Jones looking like a lock for induc- tion in his first year on the ballot. By Sunday evening, more than 150 ballots, or about one-third of the expected total, had been made public, and they showed that some players were making significant progress from a year ago, but not Bonds and Clemens.
For instance, former Montreal Expos star Vladimir Guerrero has picked up 26 votes from returning voters and seems in a strong position to be inducted in his second year on the ballot. Canadian-born Larry Walker, another former Expo, has garnered 23 additional votes, Edgar Martinez has amassed an additional 16 and Trevor Hoffman has added eight.
Even Curt Schilling, whose controversial political comments most likely cost him votes a year ago, has picked up 13 votes so far.
But as of Sunday, Bonds and Clemens remained right where they were a year ago — with no net gain from returning voters.
“With stable voters, everybody is pretty entrenched,” Ryan Thibodaux, who compiles votes that have been made public on his Baseball Hall of Fame Vote Tracker, said of Bonds and Clemens. “Their hope is definitely that a turnover is enough to help them make the jump.”
On the surface, the early voting for 2018 looks promising for both Bonds, who is baseball’s career home run leader with 762, and Clemens, who won 354 games. They had both received 70.2 per cent of the 151 ballots that had been revealed as of Sunday evening, according to Thibodaux’s tracker.
But Thibodaux said that based on previous voting patterns, he expected those vote totals to decline as more ballots are tabulated, much as they did last year when Bonds’ final total was 53.8 per cent and Clemens’ was 54.1 per cent, after both had hovered around 70 per cent with a little more than one-third of the votes counted. Still, the percentages that Bonds and Clemens did end up with a year ago were their highest annual totals to date.
“With the early ballots, the percentage is looking really high, but by the time it’s all said and done, they’re going to drop a lot,” Thibodaux said of the current totals. “I think they’ll end up in the 50s again.” But Bonds and Clemens have gained ground in the 2018 balloting with new voters, which could prove increasingly significant in ensuing years as more new voters emerge and other voters continue to be culled from the ranks.
In 2015, new voter-eligibility rules were established that eliminated any voters who had not covered baseball regularly as a member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in the previous 10 years. In effect, it is the mirror image of the rule that allows journalists to become eligible to vote after they have covered baseball for10 years. (Five newspapers do not allow their members to vote: The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times.)
If Bonds’ and Clemens’ race against the clock in their bid for enshrinement does come down to their final year, there is little doubt the vote will be a referendum on the steroid era. Appearing on a ballot for the first time in the class of 2022 will be another familiar and polarizing figure: Alex Rodriguez.