Bonds, Clemens And The MLB HOF

On Tuesday, the baseball world learned something that everyone probably expected: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were not voted into the Hall of Fame in their tenth year on the ballot.

Bonds received 66 percent of the vote, while Clemens earned 65.2 percent of the vote, which was not good enough to reach the 75 percent threshold needed for induction that was earned by only David Ortiz this year.

Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in plenty of arguments. Some will point to the impressive career figures for Bonds and Clemens when they were perceived to be clean. Others will highlight the hypocrisy of former commissioner Bud Selig being inducted while Bonds and Clemens continue to wait.

However, I’m not here to recap every argument in favor of Bonds and Clemens being inducted. Instead, I want to argue that players like Bonds and Clemens don’t need the Hall of Fame to have their careers be celebrated and recognized.

There are plenty of examples to make my case, but I think I need to start with one of the most amusing ideas for a Youtube video ever: what if Barry Bonds had played without a baseball bat?

The video from Jon Bois tries to answer a silly premise with as much data as possible and the important caveat that pitchers don’t know that Bonds doesn’t have a bat in this experiment.

Using a methodology based on how often Bonds swung at pitches in the strike zone and how often he saw pitches in the strike zone, the video concludes that Bonds would’ve had a .608 OBP in 2004 without using a bat, just one point below his real .609 OBP from that season.

Regardless of how reliable the methodology is for this video, the fact that someone made a video based on how excellent his discipline was in 2004 with almost 2 million views on Youtube is a unique kind of recognition of the greatness of Bonds that goes beyond a museum.

The legend of Bonds on the internet also requires mentioning Jon Dowd. Bonds wasn’t part of the MVP Baseball video game series from EA Sports due to a licensing issue but EA still wanted to have a 99 power left fielder on the San Francisco Giants roster, so they created Dowd. Dowd was right-handed and white to avoid any obvious similarities to Bonds, but everyone still knew it was him. When your career is so special that everyone who played baseball video games in the 2000s knows the name of your virtual alter ego, does a museum matter?

Bonds also has no shortage of iconic homers and I’m not even thinking of the ones that broke records.

During a rare interleague visit to the old Yankee Stadium, Bonds ripped an absolute bomb into the third deck of the park, prompting the legendary broadcaster Jon Miller to exclaim “This one is headed for New Jersey!”.

There’s also the time that Bonds delivered a World Series homer that was hit so far that you can’t even see where it landed from the television feed.

I can continue listing iconic parts of his career, like the time Buck Showalter intentionally walked him with the bases loaded, but I think everyone reading this knows what kind of hitter Bonds was like for his whole career and especially from 2000 to 2004.

Admittedly, Clemens isn’t quite as iconic as Bonds but that’s just because most people think home runs are more exciting to watch than strikeouts. Regardless, Clemens also had a career that is widely recognized as being one of the best ever from a pitcher. He has seven Cy Youngs and is third all-time in strikeouts, a combination that’d make him an obvious inner-circle Hall of Famer if it wasn’t for the allegations of using performance-enhancing drugs.

No one is ever going to forget the careers of Bonds and Clemens, and this also applies to other players with connections to PEDs who had iconic careers. Mark McGwire is already off the ballot and Sammy Sosa’s tenth year on the ballot just ended, but the story of their battle in 1998 will forever be one of baseball’s most memorable tales either way.

Ultimately, making the Hall of Fame doesn’t matter for how McGwire and Sosa will be remembered and discussed in the sport’s history. For comparison, Jeff Bagwell was a Hall of Famer with over 400 career homers whose career overlapped with the peak of McGwire and Sosa, yet I’ve never encountered anyone who said that Bagwell helped save baseball.

It’d be good for baseball to induct Bonds, Clemens, McGwire and Sosa but I also can understand the argument against inducting them, even if I don’t fully agree. Regardless, the induction of these players will not change how history remembers them or how baseball fans celebrate their greatness.  

However, this is not true for everyone on the ballot this year. Players like Scott Rolen, Andruw Jones and Todd Helton are the exact kind of players whose careers would truly benefit from the recognition and celebration that comes with making the Hall of Fame.

None of Rolen, Jones or Helton are all-time greats who set the standard at their position, but that doesn’t apply to everyone already in the Hall of Fame either. Tim Raines and Bert Blyleven are two of several recent examples of players who have been inducted without being considered legends on the same tier as Tom Seaver or Babe Ruth.

Inducting players like Raines, one of the best base stealers ever, ensures that he isn’t forgotten just because he wasn’t Rickey Henderson. Meanwhile, Blyleven never won a Cy Young or led the league in ERA, but he still finished his career with over 3,500 strikeouts and was in the top ten for ERA in the AL ten different times. His career was a demonstration of consistency and longevity worthy of recognition.

Now, let’s look at why Rolen, Jones and Helton earned votes, but not quite enough to be inducted this year.

Rolen was an excellent defender, winning eight Gold Gloves and being an All-Star seven times, but his hitting was merely above-average. However, he failed to reach 400 homers and barely cleared 2000 hits and only four of his 17 seasons included an OPS above .900.

Jones has a relatively similar profile to Rolen as a defense-first player, earning ten Gold Gloves with five All-Star games. On offense, Jones has over 400 homers but didn’t reach 2000 career hits. Also, his .254 career average doesn’t look glamorous as a potential HOF center fielder compared to a .284 average for Ken Griffey Jr. or .301 average from Willie Mays.

Meanwhile, Helton has strong offensive numbers with a career OPS above .900 and a 5-year peak from 2000 to 2004 with an OPS above 1.000 but has an elephant in the room named Coors Field. Helton’s career OPS in Colorado is 1.048, while it falls to .855 in away games. He also failed to reach 400 homers, a benchmark you’d typically want to see for someone playing a power-focused position like first base.

No one will be confusing the career production of any of these three with someone like Bonds, but that is exactly why they’re the kind of person where the recognition of the Hall of Fame is the most meaningful. Rolen and Jones were excellent defenders for a decade and Helton is the best Rockie ever, which all seem like pretty compelling cases to me. If none of them make the Hall of Fame, they will be largely forgotten by fans in a way that’ll never happen for players like Bonds or Sosa.

So, if you want to mourn the Hall of Fame’s lack of Bonds or Clemens, I certainly won’t stop you. However, I think players like Rolen, Jones and Helton are the ones who truly deserve sympathy for waiting another year to get honored for careers that deserve recognition and a chance to be a permanent part of baseball history.