There’s not a ton to love about the state of Major League Baseball right now if you’re a fan of the game. The league is at odds with the players union once more resulting in another lockout with no end in sight. Rumours are circulating that owners are more than happy to lose regular season games this year in order to get to favourable terms. And even the Hall of Fame committees have managed to turn what should be a celebration of the game into a complete debacle.
This week should have been a fond retrospective on the amazing career of David Ortiz. Instead, it degraded into a debate over gatekeeping, personal vendettas against players, and how the entire HOF process is essentially a farce at this point.
To be clear, the HOF voters got exactly one thing right about their class of 2022 inductee list: David Ortiz was, rightfully so, a first ballot hall of famer. His body of work, coupled with the fact that he’s tied to some of the most iconic postseason moments in league history made him a no doubter in the eyes of many.
The issue rather is all the things they got wrong, again. Through no fault of his own, David Ortiz now becomes the poster child for how the Baseball Hall of Fame has degraded into a popularity contest. No longer is it reserved for the game’s best players, but rather the best players who also happened to have a likeable personality.
It’s an interesting development considering some of the legends of the game, including a certain hurler whom the league’s most prestigious pitching award is named after, allegedly had “prickly” (to put it nicely) personalities when interacting with others. But in this case, it’s undeniable that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens aren’t enshrined in Cooperstown because of a perceived disdain for the media.
It’s certainly not because of their stats. Bonds had 2935 hits, 762HRs, 2227 Runs, 1996RBIs, a .296 BA, and a ridiculous 1.051 career OPS. He holds the career record for homeruns, the single season record for homeruns, and is top 5 in RBIs, and Runs scored. Not to mention he was also walked an absurd 2,558 times over his career, most all time in league history.
A 14x All Star, 7x NL MVP, 8x Gold Glove winner, and a 12x Silver Slugger award winner, Bonds won virtually every non-pitching award there was to win over his career.
Meanwhile Clemens was a 2x World Series champion, 11x All Star, 7x Cy Young Award winner, 1986 AL MVP, and sits 3rd all time with 4,672 career strikeouts over his 24 year career.
If not for alleged PED use, these two would have likely joined Mariano Rivera as the only players to ever receive 100% of the HOF vote on their first tries. But here’s the rub: many of the reports of their alleged steroid use also mentioned David Ortiz’s purported PED use back in 2003 as well.
So why does Ortiz get in on his first try, while Bonds and Clemens are now off the ballot altogether following 10 years of unsuccessful bids? In short, Ortiz was likeable. His “Big Papi” persona made him a larger than life personality who regularly went out of his way to be an ambassador for the game. Always ready with a great quote, and an unmistakable smile that almost begged to be photographed, Ortiz was a media darling, whereas Clemens and Bonds were guarded at best, and outright arrogant in their interactions with the press during the later stages of their careers.
Ortiz’s reluctance to address PED accusations head on was eventually dropped as a topic by reporters, because at the end of the day they liked the guy. At the other end of the spectrum, Clemens and Bonds took their already standoffish relationship with the media and kicked it into overdrive in the wake of BALCO reports and other scandals that linked them to PED use.
They became targets everywhere they went because they were all too happy to tell a reporter what they really thought of them and their line of questioning. And testy soundbites make for good headlines. In short, it became a self perpetuating cycle. The more they lashed out at the media, the more the media would hound them about the allegations.
A heated exchange between Bonds and a reporter was a way better story to cover than Ortiz giving an “aww shucks” response to any kind of PED questioning. Which is why over the years Ortiz’s name became less and less synonymous with “the steroid era”, while Clemens and Bonds became the poster children for alleged steroid use.
But the kicker really boils down to this: a larger percentage of baseball players than MLB will ever publicly acknowledge were doing the exact same things Bonds and Clemens were accused of doing. So what are we going to do, not let anyone from the 90’s to early 2000’s into the HOF? Are we going to judge players from this era based on their PR teams?
Let’s not forget this is the same league that has multiple players who have come out and admitted to using everything from cocaine, to amphetamines, Ritalin and more to gain a competitive advantage yet have been enshrined in Cooperstown for decades. How is using drugs to gain a neurological advantage over the competition any better than Barry Bonds needing a progressively larger hat size as his career progressed?
It’s not, and it’s ridiculous to try and make that argument. The sport was essentially tripping over itself to promote the Sosa vs. McGwire home run chase in the summer of 1998 despite the fact that everyone and their grandmother suspected they were juicing.
So is it the Hall of Fame or the Hall of “Who Played Nice With the Voters”? If you’re trying to truly build a shrine to the best players the game has ever seen, omitting players like Bonds, Clemens, and Pete Rose is downright absurd.
And even the league knows this. It isn’t a coincidence that in 2014 all of a sudden they modified the rules to go from 15 years of eligibility down to 10. The new generation of voters have a much different view of players like Clemens and Bonds than the old school voters do, so they changed the parameters.
I said it once already but it bears repeating: David Ortiz deserves to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But so do Bonds, Clemens, and Rose. If you want to add a little asterisk next to their name on their plaque, go nuts. But you can’t sit there and say that you’re keeping certain people out for past allegations, when you’re actively enshrining new players who were linked in the same reports.
Once again the worst enemy of Major League Baseball continues to be Major League Baseball and its antiquated notions of “purity of the game”.
-Kyle Skinner
Twitter: @JKyleSkinner