Hall of Shame

A few weeks ago, my brother had to travel to Cooperstown for a work trip. I made the three hour drive up to visit and we went to go see the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I had never been to a hall of fame before, and to be honest, my interest in baseball dropped off pretty rapidly as soon as I stopped playing Little League. Still, I was struck by the sense of history in that building. I guess I was expecting a celebration of the individual, but in fact we didn't even get to the actual hall where all the players' plaques are hung until the very end of our visit. Instead, the majority of the hall is devoted to the sport of baseball as a whole which, thinking back, makes a whole lot more sense that the single-player focused museum I had in mind. There were floors and large areas dedicated to things like the origins of the sport, stadium history, or race in baseball, and the sections specifically about records and individual players (again, what I thought would be the bulk of the hall's focus) were just stops along the way.

It was incredible seeing pictures of true pioneers of the game, whether it was the first few baseball clubs or the first women in professional baseball. Some of the displays hardly resembled modern day baseball, but seeing pictures and items from a hundred years ago just added to the mystique. I felt a much greater appreciation for the national pastime.

Today, the results of the Hall of Fame ballots of the voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America's were revealed and, perhaps not so surprisingly, no one was voted in. There are several great pieces (written by people much smarter and knowledgeable about the game than I am) about why this is a slippery slope and quite frankly, idiotic, but I wanted to take this opportunity to hate on one of my favorite targets of all time, Barry Bonds.

In his playing days, I hated Barry. As a Dodger fan, it burned to see a player on a rival team ripping up the league. His (at the time) suspected 'roid use made him an easy target, and the fact that he was by many accounts arrogant and not at all pleasant to deal with conveniently took away any guilt in drinking the haterade. I loved watching him and the rest of the Giants fail in the World Series against the Angels. Despite the fact that he was a perennial MVP contender, I wondered aloud during a game whether or not a hypothetical situation where he signed with the Dodgers would make me renounce my fandom (the decision: yes it would, and this Mexican fan who overheard turned around with a big grin on his face and high fived me). Of my entire college experience, one of my least favorite aspects was the fact that I'm an alum of the same school that he's from.

And yet. Barry was the best player I've seen play the game in my lifetime. I'm not old enough to have seen legends like Babe, Mays, Mantle, or Ty Cobb although you could reasonably argue that Bonds, with his total package, was better than many of those players. Barry was the ultimate five-tool player, and you'd have to look pretty hard to find a weakness in his game.

There's no question that Barry should be an easy first ballot entrant on the basis of his statistics. The power numbers are obvious, and to some, the most dubious, but before the 1999 season (which is when his steroid use is suspected to have started) Bonds already had 411 home runs and 445 stolen bases. To this day, he is still the ONLY member of the 400/400 club, and he achieved it in his first 12 (essentially undisputed untainted) years in the league. He was an eight time All-Star and Gold Glover, as well as a seven time Silver Slugger and three time MVP. And perhaps the most strange to me, during his unreal 2004 season, he led the league in on-base percentage by .140, which is the same gap between Todd Helton who finished 2nd and Jermaine Dye, who was 128th. Not only that, he could have finished the season with 0 hits in his 373 at bats, and still would have had a .376 OBP, good for 35th and ahead of players such as Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira.

The only thing keeping him out is the steroid thing, the undeniable mammoth in the room. It seems unfair and overly self-righteous to apply a double standard to these players, whether they are admitted or suspected users. It's impossible to fairly or accurately assess the impact of steroid use on their performance and statistics (look at this list. Not exactly packed with sluggers and flamethrowers right?) Many baseball writers made a name (and a nice living) for themselves writing about the exploits of these players in that era. Now they want to apply what Buster Olney calls "retroactive morality" and try to pretend like those times never happened. They, and really, the game of baseball itself, had no problem turning a blind eye to what these players as it was happening (as I mentioned before, it was obvious enough to make these players prime targets for jokes even at the time) and reap the benefits of the excitement these guys were bringing to the game.

There are plenty of players already in the hall who used substances to enhance their performance, players who were morally questionable (or even bankrupt) off the field. And yet NOW we decide that it's not just okay, but even reasonable to deny access to both the greatest hitter and pitcher (Roger Clemens) the league has had in decades.

The steroid era happened. Baseball has moved on. Voting for these players would not be a celebration of whatever abuses they had, just an acknowledgement that in their time, they set themselves apart from their peers. With these players, baseball has the chance to take steroids head on, recognizing its ugly past. By trying to scrub it from its history, it looks like baseball is just trying to ignore the problem, just like it did in the 90s and early 2000s.

To me, the Hall of Fame is a celebration of baseball's greatest talent and its best memorial to its history. Denying Bonds, Clemens, and other deserving players entry is a disservice to both aspects of the Hall.