PED ties keeping Barry Bonds out of Hall of Fame
Home run king again expected to fall short of election when results are announced on Tuesday.
USA TODAY has been counting down the top 10 candidates on the 2019 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot in advance of the election results Tuesday. The countdown is based on voting by our power rankings panel, which includes five Hall voters. At No. 1 is Barry Bonds.
Bonds is the all-time home run king, a seven-time MVP and eight-time Gold Glove winner and by far the most decorated MLB player currently excluded from Cooperstown’s ranks.
His Hall of Fame case remains controversial and very much tied to that of our No. 3, Roger Clemens: Both undeniably stand among the greatest in history in terms of on-field contributions, and both will forever be associated with performance-enhancing drug use in the height of the sport’s so-called steroids era.
Both Bonds and Clemens have seen steady growth in voting returns in recent years; both climbed above 50 percent for the first time in 2017 and made modest gains again in 2018 balloting.
The percentages should continue to increase as more BBWAA writers who came of age in the era of Bonds’ greatness reach the 10-year membership threshold for Hall of Fame voting, but neither Bonds nor Clemens can likely count on the type of late push that typically accompanies players’ final years on the ballot: Every voter has had plenty of time to mull their candidacies, and at this point most seem steadfast in their views on whether or not players tarnished by PED ties deserve enshrinement.
The case for
In terms of on-field performance, it’s overwhelming. Bonds hit 762 home runs.
He led the National League in Wins Above Replacement an astonishing 11 times and ranks fourth in that stat among all players in MLB history, behind Babe Ruth, Cy Young and Walter Johnson.
He is second behind only Pete Rose in times on base and second behind only Hank Aaron in extra-base hits.
He is one of only four players to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases in the same season, and he owns the single-season records for home runs (73 in 2001), offensive WAR (12.4 in 2001), on-base percentage (.609 in 2004), slugging (.863 in
2001), OPS (1.422 in 2004), walks (232 in
2004), OPS+ (268 in 2002) and runs created (230 in 2001).
The case against
The entirety of the case against Bonds is the evidence linking him to performance-enhancing drug use in the early 2000s, around the time of his surge in power production. Bonds would eventually be indicted for perjury for testifying in 2003 that he believed substances provided to him by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) were flaxseed oil and arthritis cream. He was convicted of obstructing justice in the BALCO case in 2011, but the ruling was overturned in 2015.
X factors
Bonds played in an era before MLB rigorously policed performance-enhancing drug use. Many of his already enshrined contemporaries also faced steroids suspicions during and after their careers, though none to the extent that Bonds and Clemens have. Longtime MLB commissioner Bud Selig, who presided over the league for the entirety of the era in question, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017.
Consensus
Bonds will see another uptick in the 2019 voting but appears likely to again fall short of the necessary 75 percent mark. Next year will mark his eighth on the ballot, and the guess here is that he sees another incremental gain. Bonds and Clemens are outliers, but it’s rare for players to cross the 50 percent mark without eventually landing in Cooperstown, and the guess here is that history smiles upon the best player of a generation in time for a 2021 induction.