In this year’s Baseball Hall of Fame election, only one player was voted in and it wasn’t former Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants legend, Barry Bonds.
David Ortiz was the only player voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this year.
Although Bonds has broken many Major League Baseball records and is considered to be one of the best players of all time, he fell short for the 10th and final time. Bonds has been on the ballot for the maximum of 10 years of eligibility, but will not be included on the list going forward.
Bonds, baseball’s home run king both for a career (762) and a season (73), is one of the most decorated players in the sport’s history. He even won seven Most Valuable Player awards, easily outdistancing a number of players who won three.
The knock against Bonds over the bulk of his career, especially when he started hitting home
runs at a massive place, was that his body was filled with steroids. Steroids were a major problem during his career. Though it was never proven, the accusations followed him until he played his very last game.Bonds was one of the faces of steroid use—real or speculative—and that may have worked against him in the eyes of the voters casting ballots over the past 10 years. He has always denied using steroids but found few believers. He was even dragged in front of Congress to testify about the alleged use of steroids in Major League Baseball.
Bonds isn’t the only player of his stature to be denied entry into the Hall. Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, and Curt Schilling were also left out of the Hall after being on the ballot for 10 years. However, the Hall of Fame’s veterans committee can always elect players after they fall from the ballot.
Clemens won 354 games in his career,
yet was placed in the same category as Bonds. The same accusations were levied against Sosa, who belted 600 home runs of his own. Schilling was a controversial man who made many racist comments during his days as a big-time starting pitcher and garnered controversy with the same rhetoric via his social media accounts.Ortiz, a star with the Boston Red Sox, doesn’t exactly have a clean reputation, having reportedly tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003.