Open The Hall Of Fame To Barry Bonds

 

August 7 is an interesting day in American history.  George Washington created the Purple Heart Award in 1782.  The Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II started in 1942.  The U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which put American troops in the Vietnam War, in 1964.  Barry Bonds broke Henry Aaron's home run record in baseball in 2007.

That's right.  Thirteen years ago, Bonds hit a towering home run in San Francisco to break the record that Aaron had set in 1976.  While Aaron's chase to break Babe Ruth's record of 714 was legendary in the early 1970's, Bonds' quest to own the home run record was mostly overshadowed by his connection to performance-enhancing drugs.  It also did not help his cause that Bonds was never known to be friendly to the media.

I think the time has come to come to terms that many of the great players of the "Steroid Era" in baseball (roughly from the late 1980's through the first decade of the 21st Century, though who knows what players still get away with even today).  Great players such as Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez, and Alex Rodriguez (to name a few) dominated their era but have either been directly connected to, or have admitted, use of performance-enhancing drugs.

I am a firm believer that all of these players associated with performance-enhancing drugs should be included in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I fully understand that they had an unfair advantage, and probably cost other players their jobs, but the Hall of Fame is a museum and a museum is supposed to tell the history and the story of its subjects.

Like it or not, performance-enhancing drugs were a significant part of baseball's story for at least 30 years.  To ignore that is wrong.  Keeping out the players that defined that generation is ignoring the history of the game.  Include them, but make note on their plaque that they were associated with performance-enhancing drugs.  Case closed.

I have five children and someday I want to bring them to Cooperstown, New York to visit the Hall of Fame.  Baseball has been a big part of my life and it is something I share with my children, so visiting the Hall of Fame to tour its museum is on the Dad Bucket List.  Taking them to a museum on baseball history and leaving out significant parts of that history would be like going to a museum of American Presidents and not seeing the likes of Donald Trump because we do not like the time period in which he was President.

Bonds career was one of the greatest of all-time and he deserves to be recognized in the Hall of Fame.  He not only holds the all-time home run record, finishing with 762, but he also holds the all-time record for walks (2558) and intentional walks (688).  He just missed the mythical plateau of 3000 career hits (he finished with 2935) but based on his career batting average of .298, he would have surpassed 3000 if he had been pitched too instead of intentionally walked 300 fewer times.

Bonds won 7 MVP awards, was selected to 14 All-Star Games, and won 12 Silver Slugger Awards.

By all accounts, he was the most accomplished player of his time.

So it's time to put aside the connection to performance-enhancing drugs and enshrine Barry Bonds in Cooperstown, along with all of the other great players of his era who are also on the outside looking in because of being associated with performance-enhancing drugs.  

(And while they're at it, induct Pete Rose too.  Just like the Steroid Era players, include on his plaque the information about his lifetime suspension due to gambling on baseball.  But the all-time hits leader deserves induction before he quits smoking permanently.)