For Bonds/Clemens backers: If a Hall of Fame resume isn’t spoiled by subsequent sins, would you vote in these two Black Sox?
In the time-worn debate over whether Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are Hall of Fame players, virtually every imaginable argument has long been advanced and countered. Except for one.
One argument offered by backers of Bonds and Clemens remains substantively unchallenged to this day. It is, in a nutshell, that whatever wrongs Bonds and Clemens did, those wrongs did not impact their Hall of Fame worthiness because their resumes were already Hall of Fame worthy.
MLB Network’s Bob Costas advanced this line of logic the other night on a network Hall of Fame special. He did not deny their transgressions, but declared Bonds and Clemens to be special cases based on their extraordinary talent. Costas specifically voiced a view held by several HOF voters that they should be elected because they had established Hall of Fame credentials prior to their wrongdoings, essentially rendering their wrongdoings irrelevant.
With the election results to be announced next week, it’s time to counter that argument. That counter-argument, however, does not rest on denying the Hall of Fame worthiness of either of the accused. In fact, the merits of their pre-offense statistical resumes will be agreed to.
Had they retired on, just to pick a date, Jan. 1, 2001, Bonds and Clemens both would be in the Hall today. Bonds would have left the game with a career .289/.411/.568 slash line and 494 home runs, Clemens with a 260-142 record and 3.08 career ERA, and this discussion would never occurred.
The problem is that they didn’t retire. Rather, they stayed around and did steroids. That, too, is part of their records, it was widely judged at the time to have been improper and against baseball rules, and they benefited greatly from their inappropriate actions.
To adopt the position enunciated by Costas and others is to immunize Bonds and Clemens from the price of their subversive deeds by stopping their career clocks at an arbitrary and preferential point in their histories. That approach pretends that everything subsequent to the arbitrary chosen point is irrelevant to the honor in question which, after all, is a career-long one.
That’s the counter argument in a complex sentence, but for those preferring simpler concepts, let’s boil it down to three words: Shoeless Joe Jackson.