BONDS, CLEMENS GAINING FAVOR
new york» Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and other tainted stars of the Steroids Era appear likely to get a boost in Hall of Fame balloting, but not enough to enter Cooperstown this year.
Ken Griffey Jr. seems assured of election on the first try Wednesday, possibly with a record vote of close to 100 percent. Mike Piazza, Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines also were strong candidates to gain the 75 percent needed for baseball’s highest honor.
After the elimination of about 100 retired baseball writers from the electorate, Bonds and Clemens were on track for a 5- to 10percentage-point increase. After drawing about 37 percent of the ballots last year, they were in the 48 percent range this year according to bbhoftracker.com, which tabulated public votes adding to more than one-third of the total.
Last July, the Hall’s board of directors cut eligible voters from about 575 to roughly 475 by purging writers who had not been covering the game for more than a decade. Previously, the electorate included people who had been active members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America for 10 consecutive years at any point.
“We have a somewhat different electorate,” John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, said Tuesday. “I think possibly the current electorate was not content to keep kicking the PED crowd down into a hole and leaving the Hall of Fame with a crater in its plaque room.”
Marc Maturo, a reporter covering New York baseball for Gannett in the 1970s and 1980s, was among those who lost voting rights. He said he would have voted for Bonds, Clemens, Griffey and former Denver Bear Raines.
Now a writer for the weekly Rockland County (N.Y.) Times, Maturo pointed out players who received one or two votes in recent years, such as Armando Benitez, Aaron Boone, Bret Boone, Darin Erstad, Kenny Rogers, J.T. Snow and B.J. Surhoff.
“They call these courtesy votes or friendship votes,” he said, “That should eliminate you. They’re not Hall of Famers by anyone’s imagination. But people vote for them. To me, that’s wrong.”