After failing to get the necessary 75 percent of ballots for Baseball Hall of Fame induction, Barry Bonds will have to depend on the Today’s Game Era Committee if he wants to be in Cooperstown.
He received 66 percent of votes, and since it was his tenth time in the ballot, his name will now disappear from it and he won’t enter via the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) vote.
Another top MLB star back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties; Pete Rose, is currently banned from the Hall of Fame.
Bonds wasn’t elected because of his links with steroids, but Rose was deemed ineligible because he gambled while being manager of the Cincinnati Reds, often on his own team.
Who is the bigger Hall of Fame snub?
Both Had Incredible Careers
If we consider their on-field performance, there is not a single person who doubts they both belong in the Hall of Fame.
Rose wasn’t such a dominant hitter, but his contact ability was unparalleled.
He slashed .303/.375/.409 with a 121 wRC+, which is actually the best stat to compare hitters between eras because it’s adjusted.
The wRC+ stat means weighted Runs Created Plus and the “average” player is assigned a 100 wRC+: anything lower is below-average, and anything higher is above-average.
It means Rose was 21 percent better than the average offensive player.
Since he played so much and for so long (health is a skill, they say), he had some of the highest totals in the history of the game: he leads MLB hitters in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), and singles (3,215).
His resume includes 17 All-Star Games, three World Series championships, the 1973 NL MVP award, the 1975 World Series MVP award, the 1963 NL Rookie of the Year, two Gold Gloves, one Silver Slugger and three batting crowns.
Bonds, meanwhile, is the all-time leader in home runs with 762 and has the highest mark in a single season, with 73 in 2021.
He is the second-ranked player in Wins Above Replacement (WAR), behind Babe Ruth, and won a record seven MVP awards, three of them before any steroids allegations.
He also stole 514 bases, went to 14 All-Star Games, won eight Gold Glove awards, 12 Silver Sluggers, two batting crowns, two home run crowns, and one RBI crown.
If you put 90% of baseball players EVER on steroids they still wouldn’t come even close to all of these stats. Barry Bonds is the biggest snub I’ve ever seen and the voters should be ashamed. pic.twitter.com/eVVWBy5A9C
— Dylan Slowinski (@dylans508) January 26, 2022
Bonds Is A Bigger Snub
Bonds allegedly used performance-enhancing drugs around the late nineties or early 2000s, like a sizable portion of players during the steroids era.
Rose bet on baseball while he was an active member of the MLB community, often on his team.
There is no evidence he bet against his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, but John Dowd, the attorney who investigated Rose, said in an interview in 2002 he believes the former skipper bet against the Reds while managing them.
Rose’s ban from the Hall has been one of the most controversial topics in baseball for years, but Bonds’ inability to enter Cooperstown is getting up there, too.
All things considered, Bonds is probably a bigger snub: he was the better hitter and is widely condemned for doing something that probably most sluggers were doing at the time because the league chose to look the other way.
.@StephenASmith doesn't want to hear any moralizing about Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.
"And by the way, Pete Rose should be in, too!" 👀 pic.twitter.com/nh5CuDKuKr
— ESPN+ (@ESPNPlus) January 25, 2022
Rose, per FanGraphs’ Hall of Fame specialist Jay Jaffe, “did the one thing guaranteed to get you banned for life”.
Both could eventually get in, but Bonds is the bigger snub.
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