Just Put Barry Bonds in the Hall of Fame, You Geeks

Every year, MLB writers discover brand new ways to make the Hall of Fame voting about themselves rather than the legendary players whose legacies they are destroying for a crumb of attention.

Whether it’s choosing to be the one asshole who refuses to vote for Derek Jeter, claiming no player deserves to be voted in unanimously, citing some arbitrary, fabricated code—or it’s picking and choosing which players from the steroid era belong in the Hall of Fame.

Barry Bonds is the greatest hitter of all time. Full stop.

I recognize there are people with odd anti-steroid morality who try to give Bonds a pass because his stats made him a Hall of Famer before he started juicing but 1. we don’t know that for sure and 2. who gives a shit?

Steroids or not, Bonds is the greatest to ever hold a bat. Do you know how many people did steroids back then? 99% of them didn’t get called up past AA. There is this peculiar belief that taking performance-enhancing drugs is the reason these players were great when in reality, they’re great because they’re fucking great.

I’m not sitting here writing about baseball because I am such a pure boy who never did drugs. I could’ve taken all of the HGH that was being manufactured on planet Earth and I still would’ve swung and missed at every single pitch that came in my direction.

This is where someone would normally begin to list off Bonds’s resume. No. This isn’t about any of that. The man has the most home runs EVER. Fans used to float in the bay where the San Francisco Giants play to catch his home runs. And then they would catch his home runs. In the bay. Outside of the stadium.

You cannot punish Bonds for taking PEDs when the league was elevating and openly encouraging players to do so. Everyone knew Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were covered in needle pricks and they were treated like gods by not only fans but by Major League Baseball.

Every player had the same access to these drugs and no one was really punished for taking them. You don’t get extra credit for getting an A on an open-book exam and choosing not to open your textbook to look up the answers.

At the end of the day, there are a bunch of geeks virtue-signaling their higher morality as gatekeepers to one of the biggest achievements a professional athlete could obtain while simultaneously being widely hypocritical about which steroid users they’re willing to vote for based on their own personal relationships with them.

In 2003, David Ortiz failed a steroid test yet he shows up on more writers’ Hall of Fame ballots than Barry Bonds almost entirely based on Bonds’s strained relationship with the media. Bonds was a dick while cheating and Ortiz was shaking hands and kissing babies, also while cheating.

Racists, abusers and sex predators flood the Hall of Fame but for some reason, Barry Bonds using a substance that a majority of the league was using is the line that cannot be crossed. Just put Bonds in the Hall of Fame, you losers.

So what’s the real reason Barry Bonds isn’t in the Hall of Fame?

At the end of the day, baseball is a sport that is quickly shrinking in popularity. Baseball used to be so popular in this country that writers themselves used to be borderline famous just off the strength of telling the players’s stories.

As baseball loses national relevance, as do the writers. For many of these people, Hall of Fame voting is their only chance to get the attention they used to receive. It’s why you’ll always see a baseball writer proudly tweeting out their atrocious Hall of Fame ballot where they only vote for one player like Bronson Arroyo or some dumb shit.

Not voting for Barry Bonds is the way for the older writers to hold onto some bygone era where the country actually gave a shit.

All we can do is wait for these geriatric narcissists to die and we’ll finally get the correct players in the Hall.

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