Congratulations. Looks like you got your wish. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have not been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and are now off the ballot.
Who is “you” in the sentence above?
We cannot be totally sure. It is not an individual. It is a group of people. A group of people who really didn’t want Bonds and Clemens in the Hall of Fame.
In July 2014, the Baseball Hall of Fame changed its rules for induction. Previously, players on the BBWAA ballot who received at least five percent of the vote could stay on the ballot for up to 15 years, assuming they never fell below five percent (or entered the Hall with 75 percent of the vote, obviously). However, after the decision to change the rule in 2014, players could now only stay on the ballot for a maximum of 10 years. Three players were protected by the rule as they were already over 10 years old (Don Mattingly in his 15th year, Alan Trammell in his 14th and Lee Smith in his 13th).
Everyone else on the ballot was now subject to the new rule, including Bonds and Clemens, who had already been on the ballot for two voting cycles. Yes, a rule was changed midway.
The rule change was supposedly not directly due to any specific player, but it wasn’t too hard to see what was going on. It became even clearer in 2017 when the late Hall of Famer and former Sunday Night Baseball announcer Joe Morgan wrote a letter to Hall of Fame voters with an impassioned plea to avoid putting “steroid users.” He didn’t speak for every Hall of Famer, but he sure as hell wasn’t going rogue. Morgan mentioned other Hall of Famers several times.
For whatever reason, there has been a line drawn between the so-called PED era of the Hall of Fame and a grouping of current Hall of Famers.
It is all a leap of hypocrisy. Whether we go back to Pud Galvin (a Hall of Famer, by the way) in the 1880s pumping monkey testosterone into his body or discuss the rampant use of amphetamines (“greenies”) in the Morgan era, no period of time in baseball history is “clean.” None.
And it is here that I will remind everyone that Bud Selig was inducted into the Hall of Fame by a committee of veterans appointed by the Hall. Selig was the commissioner when the so-called PED era exploded in Major League Baseball. He contradicted himself in public on different occasions, once claiming he didn’t even know anything about so-called steroids until around 1998 or even 1999 (the great home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa was in 1998), but he also testified in front of Congress that was way ahead of the game, knowing it was a problem since 1994.
Selig was also an owner during the collusion scandal. Which is a good starting point for asking yourself: Are we really going to get into the judgment of character here? We don’t need to name names, but the Hall of Fame already has a lot of not-so-great human beings. Whether they’re racists, drunks, bullies, or anything else unseemly, it’s hardly a collection of holiness.
No, it seems to me that the Hall of Fame is a museum to celebrate the greatness of baseball. Roger Clemens won seven Cy Youngs. No one else has more than five. Barry Bonds won seven MVPs. No one else has more than three.
They will now fall off the ballot (and their fates in Cooperstown will fall to a committee of veterans) as the rule change has had its intended effect, even if the Hall of Fame doesn’t explicitly say so.
Clemens’s vote share from 2016 increased from 45.2 to 65.2 percent in 2022. Bonuses went from 44.3 to 66. If there were another five voting cycles with the ever-evolving BBWAA electorate (first I’ll be voter in 2024, vote for both and I’m not nearly alone), not to mention that the holdover voters are likely to get different perspectives on the matter the further they distance themselves from the Bonds and Clemens game days, it seems very possible, if not likely, the the duo would have made it.
Like I said, the rule change did its job. He kept them out. Congratulations to everyone who wanted this. You got your wish. The line has been drawn. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are not members of the Hall of Fame.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism