Barry Lamar Bonds Should Be In Cooperstown

 

I feel like the above is an obvious statement. The man hit 762 home runs, more than anyone who has ever walked this green earth. In 2001, he hit 73 home runs, which is another all-time record. He played 22 seasons and hit .298 and was a fourteen-time all-star. In 1998, the Arizona Diamondbacks intentionally walked him with the bases loaded. Bonds walked 130 times that season and it was only the eighth-highest walk total of his career. He won seven MVP awards, was in the top ten six more times, stole thirty or more bases nine times and won eight gold gloves. He was perhaps the best player in baseball in 1990 and without question still so fourteen years later, in 2004, when he posted an OPS of 1.422 (bolstered by a .609 OBP (both all-time marks)) and averaged a home run every 8.3 at-bats, maybe the most dominant single season by a batter in baseball history. Did I mention he hit 762 career home runs? I did. Barry Lamar Bonds was something else.

The 440 members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who have a say in the matter know this, and yet still just 195 of them cast a ballot for Bonds in the most recent voting for the Hall of Fame. That’s 44.3 percent, or 0.9 percent more support than was shown to Edgar Martinez. Look, I’m from Seattle. Edgar is in my mind the greatest designated hitter of all time. Love the guy. There used to be a prominently displayed button in my basement that read “Edgar Esta Caliente.” But a reasonable mind could consider Bonds the greatest baseball player of all time, period, sans qualifiers, which is a more impressive thing. It’s great to be the fastest gazelle on the savannah, but there are cheetahs out there. That is the first time Edgar Martinez has ever been compared to a gazelle. And yet: 44.3 percent. Seems off.

I guess it would be good to mention at this point that Barry Bonds took steroids, probably a whole bunch of them, an assertion I feel comfortable making thanks to copious amounts of evidence gathered by very talented reporters, because he basically admitted as much, and because a man’s head does not grow that much in his late 30s naturally. This is the reason — this, along with the fact that he was by all accounts a tremendous asshole to the media — there are 245 more-than-competent baseball writers who don’t think Bonds has a place in the Hall of Fame.

I disagree with those 245 writers vehemently.

First, there’s the argument that Bonds was good enough to merit inclusion even if his career had ended before the specter of steroids ever arose. If Bonds had never played another game after the 1998 season — the point at which Mark Fainaru-Wade and Lance Williams assert he started juicing in their book Game of Shadows — he would have finished a thirteen-year career with 411 home runs, 445 steals, eight all-star nods and three MVPs, a 40-40 season to his name and 99.5 career WAR, which would place the abbreviated Bonds in twenty-first place on the all-time list compiled by baseball-reference.com. Eighteen of the players above him are in the Hall, and the other two are Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols.

For comparison’s sake, Ken Griffey Jr. was named on all but three ballots in this year’s Hall of Fame vote, setting an all-time record with a 99.3 percent acceptance rate, and he finished his career with 83.6 WAR. (FanGraphs’s numbers display a similar WAR disparity. The stat obviously isn’t a be-all, end-all, because no stat should be, but it’s a useful tool, like all good stats are.) Bonds was an objectively better player than Griffey, and again, this is coming from a Seattleite who was a kid in the ‘90s. If Bonds had retired in 1998, he’s unquestionably enshrined.

That didn’t happen, though. Many would argue that Bonds’s actions in the ensuing decade nullify his previous accomplishments: That admitted, proven or even alleged steroid users have no place in the most hallowed ground of America’s Pastime, and that future generations of doe-eyed innocents should be able to pilgrimage to Cooperstown and bask in the sport’s many glories without the sullying shadow of cheaters. Think of the kids, and all that. And that’s fine, I guess, and noble, but the Baseball Hall of Fame is no Elysium of perfect men. Ty Cobb is in there. The Hall shouldn’t be held up as some paragon of goodness where everyone must either be deified or excluded. It should be an honest representation of the game’s history, ugliness and all. Mention steroids on Bonds’s plaque, by all means. If you want to put him and Pete Rose and Mark McGwire in a special cheater’s wing, go ahead. Yes, integrity and sportsmanship and character are all listed as voting criteria by the BBWAA, but they should be compared against everything else on the résumé. Barry Bonds is the sport’s home run king. Not to have him in the Hall of Fame feels intellectually dishonest.

These aren’t groundbreaking arguments. You should maybe even take them with a grain of salt, considering I once had an entire album dedicated to Bonds baseball cards. He was a jerk and a cheater and no role model. But he was also one of the five greatest baseball players of all time. A lot of baseball players have taken steroids, and none of them hit 73 home runs or reached base 60 percent of the time for an entire season. There’s only one guy who’s ever done that. Barry Lamar Bonds should be in Cooperstown.

2 thoughts on “Barry Lamar Bonds Should Be In Cooperstown”

  1. You say he is one of the five best — who are the other four? If his godfather is not one of them, then I don’t buy your argument.

    Nicely done assessment. Would you make a similar argument for Pete Rose and Mark McGwire?

    1. Hey there. I say Ruth, Bonds, Mays and Aaron for sure, probably Ted Williams fifth but I’d definitely take other arguments. And I would make roughly the same case for McGwire and Rose, yeah, not quite to the same extent since I don’t think they were nearly as good. Probably some nuance in gambling vs. steroids too, but I think all three are HoFers.

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