Oracle Park, San Francisco (Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame)

 

Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame.

Outside Oracle Park, there’s a statue of Willie Mays (that’s the picture), one of the two or three best players in baseball in the 1950s when playing for the New York Giants, and the biggest star of the Giants in their first decade in San Francisco. The Giants have been playing in San Francisco for more than 60 years, so they’ve had some very good players, several of them in the Hall of Fame. But Bonds, who had some of the best seasons any Giants’ player ever had, is not. Bonds holds the all-time major league records for home runs in a career and in a season, and won the National League’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) award seven times, five for the Giants. I never liked him much – he’s a pretty surly character – but he should be in the Hall.

The sportswriters who vote for the Hall of Fame had 10 chances to vote him in, and declined every time. Although not all of them gave detailed reasoning, it’s clear that it’s because Bonds almost certainly used performance-enhancing drugs, steroids, which are illegal.

Actually, I’d put “illegal” in quotes, or give it an asterisk, just as I’d give asterisks to some of Bonds’ records. While steroids made baseball’s banned substance list in 1991, MLB didn’t test for them until 2003. I do think steroids should be illegal, because of what they do to the players, and I have little sympathy for the players who have been caught since enforcement began. But if your career depends on performance, and the only rule against a performance-enhancing drug isn’t enforced, that’s not much of a rule. In fact, I’d argue it’s an incentive to use those drugs, so I blame baseball’s “steroid era” in large part on MLB’s failure to crack down. I know it’s more complicated than that, involving privacy issues and union negiotations as well as other factors, but I’m sympathetic to those who used.

The definitive accountant of Barry Bonds and steroids is generally considered to be Game of Shadows, a book by two reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle. They concluded that Bonds started using steroids after the 1998 season, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, two lesser players, got far more attention than Bonds ever had as they chased the home run records of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris. He decided that he’d take steroids to be better at hitting home runs, and became a more one-dimensional player. A full timeline of the media and legal circus surrounding Bonds’ steroid use until near the end of his career (the circus continued well beyond that) is here.

There are two reasons why steroid use might disqualify a player from the Hall of Fame, as I see it. One is that a player who cheats, even if cheating to win, should not be allowed in the Hall of Fame. The other is that the player would not have been good enough for the Hall of Fame if he hadn’t cheated.

Gaylord Perry, a pitcher who spent the first 10 years of his career in San Francisco, reputedly used illegal substances on the ball to make it move erratically, making it harder for batters to hit. He was only caught in a game once, but in a book, he said that he had done it regularly. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1991. So simply cheating to win has not disqualified players in the past (cheating to lose is something different).

Would Bonds have been a good enough player to make the Hall of Fame if he hadn’t taken steroids? The fact that we probably know exactly when he started using them means that we can play what-if. A statistical projection of his career after he started using suggests that his numbers would have been quite a bit lower, but the projected numbers are still clearly worthy of the Hall of Fame.

I think a more interesting way to look at it is to ask whether he would have made the Hall of Fame if the day that he decided to use steroids, he had been in a fatal plane crash instead (the careers of Hall of Famers Thurman Munson and Roberto Clemente ended that way). On that day, Bonds had played 13 seasons (Munson played 11), had won three MVPs, eight Gold Glove awards as the best fielder at his position and seven Silver Slugger awards as the best hitter at his position. In other words, he had been the best player in baseball for a decade. That’s clear Hall of Fame territory. Afterwards, he played nine more seasons, and won four more MVPs and five more Silver Sluggers, but he was a Hall of Famer without those.

Two other notes here that are only partly relevant to this discussion.

1)      Several other players who were caught using steroids, or are strongly suspected of using them, have not been voted into the Hall of Fame either. The most notable is pitcher Roger Clemens. Like Bonds, and unlike many of the others, his numbers before he went on steroids are clearly good enough. But I like him even less than Bonds. Besides being as surly as Bonds, Clemens blamed the delivery of steroids to his house on his wife, who he said used them to look younger, and she testified to that in court. That’s a devoted wife.

2)      I was once in an athletic competition with Barry Bonds, and I came out on top. A few years after he retired from baseball, he was into bicycling, and rode in El Tour de Tucson, a 100-mile ride in Tucson that brings in thousands of cyclists each year. I beat him by 10 or 15 minutes, but perhaps it should have an asterisk. Ten or 20 miles from the finish, I saw him by the side of the road, changing a flat tire.

More about the venue:

When we go to two games in the same park, we usually try to sit in different parts of the park, but we sat within three rows of the same place as we did last night. That’s because I think the view is so spectacular.

I also like the fact that even though the park is relatively new (2000), it has a sense of history.

·       They have the statue of Mays, although lots of parks have statues of the team’s most famous player(s) out front.

·       They still play a ditty from 1962 that mentions Candlestick Park after an inning when a Giant hits a home run.

·       On the ramps between levels, they have quotes on the walls, including one about one of the most famous plays in New York Giants history, a 9^th-inning home run by Bobby Thomson in a playoff game against the Dodgers in 1950.

·       On some of the entrances to the seating area from the concourse, they have sample jerseys from various eras.

I won’t go into detail here, but there are other parks that show a sense of history. I like those touches, since one of the appeals of baseball for me is the fact that the game has such a long history.

Our companions:

Today it was Scott and Betsy. I shared an office in grad school with Scott 40 years ago, and Scott, Kerry and I had weekend season tickets (all 27 of the season’s weekend games) for the Cardinals one year. I believe it was that season that we came up with the custom of rating the national anthem on a scale of 1 to 10, a custom that Kerry and I continue to this day.

The game:

I thought this part of the blog was going to be about redemption. Last night, it was a close game until the 8^th inning, when Ryan Walker came in to pitch for the Giants, facing the top of the Yankees’ order. He got the first two hitters out, but the next three hitters got single, triple and homer, and the game was out of reach. Today, Walker appeared in the 7^th inning, facing the top of the Yankees’ order again, but with a two-run lead. He got the first two hitters out, gave up a single, then struck out Giancarlo Stanton, who hit the crucial homer off him last night. Redemption.

But only for Walker, not for the Giants. In the 9^th inning, Camilo Doval, their hard-throwing (he’s thrown three of the five fastest pitches in the league this year) closer came in. When it came around to the top of the Yankees’ order, they accomplished what they could not against Walker, and scored four runs, capped by a long home run by Juan Soto.

So the Yankees won 7-5, sweeping the series, and leaving the two-third of the sellout crowd that was Giants fans looking pretty glum.