McGwire, Sosa, Bonds: Hall of Fame Inductees?

August 12, 1994 marked the beginning of a 232-day Major League Baseball strike – a strike that cancelled the 1994 playoffs and slightly shortened the 1995 season (although an entire article could easily be devoted as to why the MLB should have kept the schedule at 144 games moving forward).

As is the case with any major league strike, fans were various levels of furious. The strike was so long that it was not hard to find fans who loudly professed that they were done with baseball.

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What brought back hoards of fans to the MLB brand? A partial list of currently blacklisted Hall of Fame nominees – Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds.

The Home Run chase of 1998 between McGwire and Sosa was the first “must-see” baseball event following the strike. Both batters entered that September with 55 dingers apiece, 6 shy of Roger Maris‘ record. McGwire tied Maris on September 7th and passed him on September 8th, while Sosa tied and passed Maris on September 13th with weeks yet to go in the season. McGwire currently sits 10th overall in career homers (Albert Pujols needs 23 to catch him), while Sosa sits 8th overall with 609.

Bonds joined the San Francisco Giants in 1993, where he had 12 consecutive seasons of 30-plus home runs with the piece de resistance his record-setting 73 home runs in 2001. In what might be the one record with the most requests for an asterisk, Bonds holds the record for all-time homers with 762. Bonds was once such a feared hitter that he was even once intentionally walked with the bases loaded.

On a side note, Bonds is now the hitting coach for the Miami Marlins, working with slugger Giancarlo Stanton.

Why are these three players not already in the Hall of Fame? One word – steroids.

Steroids are a drug used to help athletes (and regular people) recover from injury. The use of steroids in building muscle mass reduces down time from your sport of choice. While these drugs definitely increase power, do they sharpen a person’s hand/eye coordination? Does anybody believe that if they handed a baseball bat to a 1980’s Hulk Hogan, he would match Bonds’ power numbers while he was the Pittsburgh Pirates?

While steroids had been part of baseball’s banned substance list since 1991, testing for major league players did not begin until 2003, when MLB conducted surveys to help gauge the extent of performance-enhancing drug (PED) use in the game.

Dec 13, 2007, The Steroids Era – ESPN.com

With a 12-year gap between when the MLB banned steroids and when they actually started testing for such drugs, does keeping these three out of the Hall of Fame somehow deflect the blame off the league for “allowing” the cheating to happen? The term “turned a blind eye” is never more relevant than in this situation. 

Do not read that as a “conspiracy theory,” but instead as a simple reminder that times were different in the 1990s: Television was king and there was barely an internet, never mind the phenomenons which are Facebook and Twitter. Even the heaven-send that is MLB.tv did not begin until 2002.

Television rankings were slipping and there had to be a point where the league decided that the short-term popularity burst would outlast the long-term pain of any impending scandal.  This is no insinuation that MLB executives had any in-depth knowledge of any drug use, but the positive attention the home run races brought was hard to ignore. 

Looking at a list of World Series television rankings, you can note that the 1999 Series stopped a four-year downward spiral in viewership since baseball returned from the strike. You can also note that from 2005 and beyond, TV viewership of the World Series has not come close to the 1999 ratings.

The reasons for the downward trend are too numerous to explore but do not fool yourself: TV is still king. Just ask the Arizona Diamondbacks:

• The D-Backs unexpectedly won the Greinke sweepstakes, beating out the rival Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants for the free-agent ace Friday night. He reached agreement on a six-year, $206.5-million deal, sources told The Associated Press….[T]he Diamondbacks reeled in an even bigger prize. They had money to spend — last February, they signed a TV deal with Fox Sports Arizona for more than $1.5 billion over 20 years.

Maybe in the case of Sosa, McGwire and Bonds their stats are inflated, but if not for the efforts of these three men, baseball would be down at least one fan. If you cannot vote them in based on their numbers, then vote them in on the notion that in 1998 they saved baseball. This is especially the case with McGwire.

This will be McGwire’s 10th and final appearance on the ballot. The former St. Louis Cardinal, and “bash brother” of Jose Canseco while playing in Oakland, will sadly always be more remembered for steroids instead of homers.  The TV show “The Simpsons” summed up McGwire’s tenure in baseball nicely by insinuating that the MLB used home runs to cover up their own inequities.

Sosa and Bonds are appearing on the ballot for their 4th time. It seems almost a foregone conclusion that both gentleman will ride out their ten years on the ballot before riding off into steroid/baseball purgatory. Luckily, there does seem to be a slow changing of the guard.

Here are the two main points from a recent Buster Olney article about blacklisted Hall of Fame nominees:

1. There was never a way to know exactly who did what, and when, and in what volume, and ascertain a proper context for any one player’s use of performance-enhancing drugs.
2. It has never been the job of reporters to dictate history, but rather to reflect it — and Bonds, Clemens, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez,Ken Griffey Jr. and others were the best players of their times.

The human element makes democracy tricky, does it not? Give a group of folks the power to determine the fate of potential Hall of Famers, and you then have to deal with factions, all of which have strong opinions.  On a much grander stage for a much smaller prize, having fans vote for All-Star Game starters has the same flaws. There truly is no right or wrong way to decide who should or should not be chosen.

That said, it is mind-boggling that in a sport so driven by stats, the home run king stands on the outside looking into Cooperstown.  At least now, Bonds is no longer unique to the MLB situation of being statistically dominant enough to be in the Hall of Fame but marred with the steroid stigma. If the allegations against Peyton Manning come to fruition, will the NFL blacklist one of their surefire first-ballot Hall of Famers?

The MLB will unveil their 2016 Hall of Fame class on Wednesday January 6th. Slim and none are the chances that McGwire, Sosa, or Bonds will be on that ballot. On the other hand, if you Google the phrase “cheaters in the MLB Hall of Fame”, you would have hours of reading on your hand.