Does Anyone Doubt Barry, Roger Are Hall of Famers?

By Art Spander
 
The issue is one of perception more than of judgment. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens – and yes, Mike Piazza – have not been allowed to pass muster. Yet does anyone, including the balloters who rejected them, doubt they are Hall of Famers?
    
Which is why the vote as a lesson to future generations, if you will, is nonsense. Yes, I voted for them, along with Mark McGwire. And I would vote for Pete Rose, who merely recorded more hits than anyone in the history of major league baseball, except he’s never going to be on the ballot.
    
We know Rose is a Hall of Famer, even without the plaque. Same thing for Bonds, the all-time home run leader, and Clemens, who won seven Cy Young Awards.
  
The prettiest girl in town doesn’t necessarily have to win Miss America for us to recognize her beauty. Rose, Bonds, Clemens and Piazza won’t have to get elected for us to know they are Hall of Famers.
    
Bonds won three MVPs before most of the country even had even heard of performance-enhancing drugs. Clemens struck out 20 in a game back in 1986. (And McGwire hit 49 home runs in his rookie season, 1987, before anyone could tell a steroid from a stereo.)
    
A little chicanery – although the self-righteous will say one has nothing to do with the other, even if it does because both play loose with the rules: Gaylord Perry was elected to the Hall and then wrote a book describing how he doctored the balls he was pitching with petroleum jelly. A little wink and nod. And a permanent plaque.
   
Either the Hall of Fame is a reward for greatness or it is not. The voting writers failed to make that decision.
  
“The Hall of Fame is supposed to be for the best players to have ever played the game,” was the statement released by Michael Weiner, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association on Wednesday when it was announced for the first time since 1996 that not a single player had been elected to the Hall.
   
Understand, the man is biased. He represents the players, good and bad. Understand, the man is correct.
   
The “best players to have ever played the game.” If Bonds, Clemens and Rose are not in that category, then we better create a new category.
  
The New York Times on Wednesday had an article about the reprobates who are in the Hall, the racists, the sociopaths. “Plaster saints is not what we have in the Hall of Fame,” the baseball historian John Thorn told the Times. Nor, for the moment, suspected PED users, not that some hadn’t already been elected.
    
A candidate, someone who has played 10 years and been retired five years, needs 75 percent of the votes from the eligible members of the Baseball Writers Association of America to make the Hall. Bonds received 36.2 percent, Clemens 37.6 percent. Nearly two-thirds of the voting baseball writers opposed each? Please.
    
They talk about the smell test. What we lack here is the vision test. Was Barry Bonds the player in the bigs from the early 1990s until he left after the 1997 season? Was Roger Clemens the man you’d want on the mound when it mattered? Yes to both those questions.
    
Cooperstown isn’t Lourdes. The inductees only had to be recognized as some of the best players of their time, not Mother Theresas in spikes. The only position player I saw better than Bonds was Willie Mays, Barry’s godfather.
    
What made Bonds so effective wasn’t necessarily his power -- not until the later years when we’re told he bulked up to get the home runs and attention of McGwire and Sammy Sosa – but his baseball skills, learned at the foot of his major league dad, Bobby.
   
Barry Bonds knew when to steal, where to position himself on defense, toward which base he should throw. His arm wasn’t the best, but his instincts were.
   
The wonderful arm belonged to Clemens, who at times simply wound up and threw the ball past people. He was the Rocket Man, an Elton John song come to life and come to win. As with Bonds, he made games adventures, full of excitement.
   
Piazza is the finest-hitting catcher ever. He’s never been accused of using steroids, at least not openly. But he was a star in what detractors have labeled the steroid era, and so by suggestion and association he is linked and punished.
   
Buster Olney of ESPN pointed out that baseball, the game, the business, exploited Bonds and Clemens – and the rest – making money and making headlines off of their accomplishments. There was elation as McGwire and Sosa had their home run battle in the summer of ’98. There was box office.
    
Fun while it lasted. Guilt ever since it finished.
   
No one is certain who took what, but what is certain is that a Hall of Fame without Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the best of their time, is inconsequential.