Barry Bonds has not come close to receiving the necessary amount of votes to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but the slugger believes he will eventually be elected to baseball immortality.
“I love Major League Baseball. I always have and I loved playing the game,” Bonds told MLB.com’s Barry M. Bloom. “I don’t have any doubts that I’ll get there in time. I’m bothered about it, but I don’t sit here going, ‘I’m not going to make it.’ I don’t see how it stays the way it’s going. In my mind, in my head, I’m a lot more positive about it than I am negative. I think eventually they’ll do the right thing.”
Bonds will be on the 2015 Hall of Fame ballot, which will mark his third chance out of 10 to receive the 75 percent of votes necessary for election. He received 36.2 percent of the vote in 2013 and the figure dropped to 34.7 percent last year.
Bonds is the home run king in baseball with 762 career home runs and 73 in a season, both of which are records. He also holds the career records for walks and intentional walks. His on-base percentage, slugging percentage and career OPS are among the best in baseball history. He believes that all of his accomplishments mean he should be enshrined in Cooperstown.
“I deserve to be there,” Bonds said to Bloom. “Clemens deserves to be there. The guys that are supposed to be there are supposed to be there. Period. I don’t even know how to say it. We are Hall of Famers. Why are we having these conversations about it? Why are we talking about a baseball era that has come and gone? Era, era, era. Do the best players in the game deserve to be in the Hall of Fame? Yes. Everything that everyone has accomplished in baseball is in that [record] book. Correct? So if that’s correct, then we need to be in there. End of story.”
[Previously: Bonds – I should be inducted ‘without a doubt’]
What’s keeping Bonds and Clemens (as well as others) out of the Hall are their ties to performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds has admitted to taking the “cream” and the “clear” which were both testosterone supplements. However, his perjury case centered around whether he knowingly took illegal substances (Bonds claimed he did not know they were testosterone products).
Bonds used PEDs just like many other players of his era did. As much as I dislike him, he still deserves recognition in the Hall; it’s unfair to single out him and others while writers induct other players from the same era who may or may not have used, too. In fact, Jose Canseco says the Hall already inducted a steroids user. Eric Byrnes said the same thing.
Just group all the players from the era together in the steroids wing and induct the standout players, regardless of suspicion or admitted use. That’s the fairest way to handle the matter.
Forearm bash to Eye on Baseball
