Why Barry Bonds deserves to be in Hall of Fame

Barry Bonds is the poster child of steroid use, but his exclusion from the Hall of Fame is almost as big a travesty as Pete Rose being held out.

Another year has come and gone and Barry Bonds is once again not heading to Cooperstown. Despite the wild hypocrisy of voters who are at this point on a personal vendetta to keep him out of the Hall of Fame, Bonds may be one of the most deserving eligible players year in and year out on the ballot.

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Baseball ‘purists’ use tradition as a way of saying Barry Bonds deserves to be out, but that’s as weak of an argument as the ones baseball writers smugly shoot down on a routine basis for those saying he deserves to be in. Letting Barry Bonds into the Hall of Fame is not as black and white as people may try to make you think, as the grey area extends beyond just Bonds and the steroid era and includes all of baseball.

You have to wonder that if Bonds was playing just 10 years earlier, would he already be in the Hall of Fame? There is a certain point at which baseball writers being to lay down fire and brimstone on players, unfairly assuming that anyone pre-1980 wasn’t using performance enhancing drugs.

While Bonds was collecting the first 400 homes run, 400 steals career of anyone in baseball history, the writers who are damning him to baseball hell were busy drooling over the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

Everyone is alway looking for an edge and not everyone is going to go about obtaining that edge in an honest manner. While HGH and modern steroids are new pharmaceutical enhancements to the black market vitamin game, performance enhancers like adderall and cocaine have been around for years.

If you honestly believe that players in the 1900s through the 1940s weren’t tempted by the idea of using cocaine as a performance enchanting drug, then you’re delusional.

If we’re going to paint black marks on all players we even suspect of using steroids, then the entire modern era is guilty. Purists use the weak argument that Barry Bonds soiled the game by pharmaceutically enhancing his body to make him a better baseball player. If that’s the case, any player using whey protein, modern vitamins and any other protein milkshake that exists now and didn’t when Ty Cobb, Christie Mathewson and Mickey Mantle were playing should be judged close to how Bonds has been.

The double standard is embarrassing. That’s not to say guys went to the extremes with their use of modern medicine, but factors like longer season, better technology and other enhancements to the game are written off as simple evolution. Meanwhile, Bonds is seen as a villain because he bought into the era in which he played, even though he’s not even the worst of the steroid users.

If you can unequivocally say that Barry Bonds got a bigger body purely from steroid use, why is it so easy to defend the massive growth of supposedly clean players like Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas? If they got bigger using protein and weights, then why is it not assumed that that’s the first route Bonds tried before being pushed into steroids?

Any player using whey protein, modern vitamins and any other workout milkshake that exists now and didn’t when Ty Cobb, Christie Mathewson and Mickey Mantle were playing should have the same asterisk that Bonds has. The double standard is embarrassing.

This is argument is exclusive to Bonds and the handful of players like him. Bonds crosses over between the era where players were generally assumed to be clean and the era where everyone who gained more than three pounds in the offseason is a steroid abuser.

Wipe the drool off your mouth for two seconds to check the numbers on Bonds before the steroid allegations kicked in. There was a solid 10-15 year period in Bonds career where he was amassing numbers in what appears to be a clean state. That can’t be discounted if players like Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza and others are going to be exonerated.

You have to look at Barry Bonds as a Greek tragedy. He was without a doubt the best player in the game when he was hitting his prime in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, with his run from 1994-2000 being some of his best years of anyone’s career.

Even after he was blacklisted, Bonds continued to fill seats and be a spectacle. You can’t sit around in hindsight and say watching Barry Bonds was a travesty when every home run he hit was something you had to see. That’s may not be Hall of Fame worthy, but it’s more than worth mentioning that we bought into Bonds even after the steroid allegations and his numbers don’t lie — even if they’re tainted.

No one is saying Bonds is a clean player, as the BALCO scandal speaks for itself. But you cannot discount the fact that there is a pre-steroids era of Bonds career and a post-steroids era with the years before he juiced being the best years of his career.

Barry Bonds is not a warm and cuddly figure, much like how Pete Rose is not a warm and cuddly figure so it’s hard to defend him. But if we’re going to have a tilted argument then all facts need to be considered. Barry Bonds was a product of the baseball environment we was a part of and that was often times a toxic environment thanks to the writers.

While Bonds was collecting the first 400 home run, 400 steal career of anyone in history, the writers who are damning him to baseball hell now were busy drooling over the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa then. Neither of those players had anywhere near the careers of Barry Bonds up to or beyond that point, and it’s at this point in which Bonds transforms from the best player in the game into a Greek tragedy who juiced to give people what they wanted.

Barry Bonds tried to do it clean, but he was met with resistance from the very writers who always found a way to damn his play — or flat out ignore it. Baseball writers who get their panties in a twist over smudging some obscure WAR percentage from some random 1921 double header between the Yankees and Tigers flat out ignored the numbers Bonds was putting up that should have excited them. Instead, they were busy oogling the big breasted girl walking down the street in the form of the epic 1998 home run chase.

We don’t have to universally love Barry Bonds nor do we have to excuse his actions in the late 90s and into the 2000s. Instead, we must acknowledge that we created Barry Bonds by the way we paid attention to him during his prime. We wanted cheap thrills, and that’s what Bonds transformed his game into to give us.

Bonds doesn’t have to be thrown a parade to Cooperstown, but he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame as his impact on the game of baseball from a statistical standpoint — pre-steroids and post — is impossible to ignore without sheer arrogance.

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