San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Bonds, Clemens likely to be shut out
On Tuesday afternoon at 5 p.m., 10 years of handwringing, hedging and holier than thou explanations will arrive at an apex. Two of baseball’s greatest players will likely be denied admission to the sport’s most hallowed grounds. Debate whether they’ll ever gain it won’t end.
Barring a stunning reversal of a nine-year trend, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will not be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame when results are revealed on MLB Network. A second straight year with no BBWAA-elected Hall of Famers is feasible.
Candidates are afforded 10 years of eligibility on the Baseball Writers Association of America’s ballot. Bonds and Clemens have exhausted it. Their fate will fall to the Hall of Fame’s Era Committees, a panel of reporters, former executives, players and front office officials tasked with confronting a conundrum the BBWAA wrangled over for 10 years.
Bonds has the most home runs in baseball history. No modern starting pitcher is more decorated than Clemens, the nearly lifelong Texan who spent three seasons with the Astros.
According to BaseballReference, Bonds was worth 162.7 wins above replacement. Only Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson and Cy Young were worth more. Among pitchers, just Johnson and Young have been worth more than Clemens’ 139.2 bWAR in baseball history.
Steroid speculation overshadows all of it, casting an unmistakable stain on two of the game’s generational faces for much of the Hall of Fame electorate, a collection of more than 400 baseball writers with wide-ranging theories and thoughts on the prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs.
Neither Clemens nor Bonds has polled above 61 percent in his previous nine years on the ballot. Seventy-five percent of the vote is required for election. As of Friday afternoon, Hall of Fame tracker Ryan Thibodaux had received 175 ballots from voters. Bonds appeared on 136 — 77.7 percent. Clemens garnered 134 votes for 76.6 percent.
Thibodaux estimated 392 ballots will be cast, so more than half are missing from his tracker. That Clemens and Bonds had each gained just three new votes from the 175 publicly available ballots in Thibodaux’s tracker does not bode well.
Though both are currently above 75 percent in public balloting, the numbers are a mirage. Last year, for example, Bonds tracked at 73.7 percent and Clemens 73.2 percent in the ballot tracker. After the full results were revealed, neither man eclipsed 62 percent of the full vote.
Both Bonds and Clemens were named in the Mitchell Report. Each denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs during an era when it seemed everyone else did. Major League Baseball adopted its Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program in 2006.
Bonds and Clemens both ended their careers in 2007 without a suspension or proven positive test from Major League Baseball. Bonds’ body transformation informs some voters. Both he and Clemens were indicted for perjury amid accusations they lied under oath about using steroids. Clemens was acquitted. Perjury charges against Bonds were dropped, and a conviction of obstruction of justice was overturned.
The absence of a strict testing and punishment policy during Bonds and Clemens’ prime still leaves unanswered questions, forcing voters to form their own opinions about the legitimacy of their legacies. Some accept the prevalence of PEDs in the era, assume there are already players enshrined in Cooperstown that used steroids, and judge Bonds and Clemens for their on-field exploits.
Others take a more hardline approach. Fourteen voters submitted a blank ballot last year, more than in any election in history. Thibodaux’s tracker has four blank ballots this year, one when a more concrete direction for voters might be manifesting thanks to two first-time candidates.
David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez represent the distinct difference for which some voters search. Rodriguez is a proven steroid abuser. Speculation surrounds Ortiz’s storied career, but no proof has ever materialized.
In 2009, Rodriguez admitted to steroid use during the early 2000s while with the Texas Rangers. Major League Baseball then suspended Rodriguez for the entire 2014 season for his role in the Biogenesis scandal.
Rodriguez’s admission and suspension should crater his chances, maybe even more than Bonds and Clemens. Manny Ramirez’s candidacy provides a perfect parallel. Ramirez’s Hall of Fame credentials are compelling. He made 12 AllStar
teams and won nine Silver Sluggers with a .996 career OPS. Ramirez’s 69.3 career bWAR is higher than Hall of Fame outfielders Tony Gwynn, Andre Dawson and Dave Winfield.
Ramirez also served two suspensions after testing positive for performanceenhancing drugs. He’s never polled higher than 28.2 percent in five previous years on the ballot. Ramirez has received 66 votes in Thibodaux’s tracker — 37.7 percent of the 175 ballots revealed. Rodriguez has 71 votes and 40.6 percent. Both men are mathematically eliminated from contention this year.
Ortiz was never suspended for a positive test. The New York Times reported he tested positive in 2003 as part of an anonymous
screening process across the sport. Ortiz vehemently denied wrongdoing. He did not fail a drug test at any point during his 20-year career. In 2016, commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged false positives within the group of anonymous tests that reportedly included Ortiz .
“Even if your name was on that (anonymous) list,” Manfred told reporters in 2016, “it’s entirely possible that you were not a positive.
“I don’t think anyone understands very well what that list was.”
More voters might show hesitancy toward Ortiz’s position. Frank Thomas’ election in 2014 broke ground for designated hitters in Cooperstown. Edgar Martinez furthered it in 2019, after enduring the requisite 10 years for his election.
Both Thomas (73.8) and Martinez (68.4) were worth more wins above replacement than Ortiz’s 55.3 during their careers. Ortiz does have postseason prowess — a .947 OPS in 85 games and the 2013 World Series MVP — and an outsized personality in a massive media market. Neither Thomas nor Martinez can claim that.
Ortiz leads all balloting after 175 publicly released votes. He has received 147 votes and, according to Thibodaux’s math, will need another 147 for induction. If Ortiz is not elected Tuesday, his polling obviously bodes well for future ballots.
Rodriguez faces a more daunting climb. Bonds got 36.2 percent of the vote during his first year on the ballot. Clemens got 37.6 percent. Neither has climbed beyond 61 percent.
Rodriguez’s re-emergence as a television personality on Fox and ESPN could be part of a ploy to rebrand himself to a newer generation. BBWAA members must spend 10 years in the organization before receiving a Hall of Fame vote.
Generalizations are dangerous, but the wave of younger voters — many of whom grew up in the steroid era, accept its prevalence and know nothing else — could be more amenable to the era’s greatest players. Twenty-six firsttime voters have publicly revealed their ballots across 2021 and 2022. Twenty-two of them voted for both Bonds and Clemens. Eight of the 13 publicly known first-time voters in 2022 voted for Rodriguez.
The trend could favor Rodriguez. It is too late for Bonds and Clemens, but both could again come up for election in 2022. The Today’s Era Committee will meet at the 2022 Winter Meetings to vote for members of the 2023 Hall of Fame class.
Harold Baines and Lee Smith were elected by the Era Committee in 2019 off the 10-person Today’s Era ballot. Lou Piniella missed out by one vote. Others not elected included sluggers Albert Belle and Joe Carter, managers Charlie Manuel and Alamo Heights High School and Trinity University graduate Davey Johnson and — perhaps most notably — longtime New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
Whether Bonds and Clemens are on the next Today’s Era ballot is a mystery. If they are, the 16member committee must wrestle with a dilemma that refuses to die.