Bonds, or, The Hall Of Fame Vote

The ballots are in. And while it might not have the glamor as say, the Oscars nominations, the 2013 Baseball Hall of Fame voting results – to be announced today at noon – are being debated as much as any Hall of Fame vote that I can remember.

One reason for this is Barry Bonds, or, maybe we should call him Buried Bonds, for the way he’s been vilified as the best player in The Steroids Era.

The question is not whether we actually like Bonds as a person, but moreso: are his on field accomplishments — taking into account what we know about his connection to performance enhancing drugs — worthy of being recognized in what is a shrine for the all-time greats.

The answer – like Bonds himself, like the era he played in, like the Hall of Fame arguments surrounding it – is complicated.

To get to the bottom of it, we must first remove the necessity to view Bonds as either a villain or victim of his era; one in which he dominated without performance enhancers (far as we know) for most of his career, and set historical records with the help of the same drugs that everyone else was on (far as we think).

Bonds was not some outlier that went on his own human growth hormone binge while everyone watched him further extend the gap between himself and every other hitter in the league. If you’ve read “Love Me, Hate Me” and “Game Of Shadows”, you know that the possibility exists that Bonds was sent on his drug-using path because of disdain towards how Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa attained their results and jealousy at the attention that it reaped them. And so, Bonds decided to go on his own chase for immortality. He isn’t a villain for this, he’s just human.

On the flip side, Bonds is not entirely without fault. Surrounded by the likes of Bobby Bonds and Willie Mays growing up, he is well aware of the history of the game, and values where people rate him amongst the all-time greats (which ended up being his downfall anyways, chasing the recognition he already had). To embrace the use of performance enhancers is both irresponsible to himself and disrespectful to the game. As such, it would be a reach to call him a victim.

But when we talk about Bonds we’re really talking about the entire Steroids Era, an era that reiterated this fact: that most athletes are entitled, and for some of them – a lot of them in this case — that entitlement feeds into their ego, and their ego tells them that they’re capable of breaking the rules without being caught and be better for it.

And as a result, it’s allowed everyone to come together on a moral high ground and judge: fans who have their own opinions on what’s right and wrong, Congress who wants to use baseball’s drug use as a platform for who knows that each individual’s agenda was, and for Hall Of Fame voters to decide whether these players are deserving of a place in Cooperstown.

If Bonds is to be faulted for anything, it’s the fact that he represented everything that was right and wrong about the Steroids Era. He was a demonstration of just how superhuman athletes can become when you combined talent with enhancement. But at the same time, as the landscape was changing in baseball, and external pressures pushed to have them come down harder on its players and police themselves, he became a lightning rod for every conversation, every argument, every agenda that sought to bring down the poisonous environment that was Major League Baseball.

The only mistake that Bonds made was not being the first performance enhanced athlete to rescue baseball from its labor strike of ’94. McGwire and Sosa – similar offenders – were glorified, while Bonds received the exact opposite treatment because by the time he was setting the all-time home run record in a season and later of all-time, baseball wasn’t able to keep a lid or look the other way at the rampant drug use anymore. It had to abandon its ignorance, and pretend that they were conducting themselves seriously all along. It helped that they had a particularly polarizing player to cast as villain.

Personally, Bonds was the greatest baseball player I’ve ever watched – his 73 home run season was so astounding to me. As much as we’d like to think that teams and players meet our expectations all the time. They rarely do. This is especially true in baseball where even the best hitters fail in the majority.

But for that season, Bonds reversed that trend. If you tuned in for a home run, more often or not you got it. Well, except for all the other times he was given the free pass to first base. He made the impossible seem a little closer to reality, and made the game look silly, and he was able to because the league was happy to benefit from what Bonds did.

I’m able – or willing – to set aside the fact that he was juicing out of his mind (or butt) because I don’t believe that Bonds represented all that was wrong with The Steroids Era. Instead, I see him as a creation of the league’s ignorance.

Put a man in a system where he’s allowed to bend the rules and run wild, and he will. If you leave the jail cells unlocked, the inmates will do as they wish. If you turn a blind eye to drug use and steroids testing, everyone from minor leaguers to future Hall of Famers will do what is necessary to keep up with everyone else, or give themselves the necessary edge to succeed.

When I look at Bonds, I see a brilliant career that’s been overshadowed by a need to have someone be the scapegoat, to be an example of an entire system gone sideways. Instead of being celebrated for what he did, we only talk about how he did it, and he became an avatar for everything that was wrong with baseball. The problems that baseball had – and still has, as we’re still seeing drug related suspensions with some regularity – was bigger than Bonds, yet every argument seemed to be only about him.

And even if Bonds and the rest of the Mitchell Report All-Stars don’t get enshrined into the Hall Of Fame, fans like myself and many others will remember this era. They’ll remember Bonds’ accomplishments. And if Cooperstown is supposed to serve as a collection of the game’s greatest players for every future generation to remember, then leaving these players out will only serve to remind everyone how hypocritical and naïve the game of baseball was.

I rather remember the players accomplishments and the league’s incompetence, then to forget both and pretend nothing ever happened, and just go about my way thinking that players like Bonds are supposed to shoulder the historical blame for all of this mess.

To forget about Bonds is to forget about when baseball went wrong, and to do so we are letting the league to move to a better place while punishing the players who helped them get there. That’s cheating too.

Illustration courtesy of Nathan McKee, whom you can follow on Twitter @Dr_Dawg_MD. Check out his website for more information on his other works; some of his prints are available for purchase at the Double Scribble online store.

Posted on 9 January, 2013

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  2. knicks411 said: Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame baseball knew what was going on after the strike but they let it go on because they needed baseball back on the map Www.Knic…
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