When it comes to Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, it’s time to ratchet things down. Another year of Hall of Fame voting has passed, and despite some early indications that their candidacies might gain real momentum this time around, both ended up falling well short of election.
Bonds and Clemens are the two most accomplished baseball players not in the Hall of Fame by any number of measures — including the most Most Valuable Player awards (Bonds), the most Cy Young awards (Clemens) and wins above replacement — but neither came close to 50 percent in the latest election, let alone the 75 percent required for induction.
That, of course, is because of their links to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It’s an issue that continues to make Cooperstown very much off-limits to them.
True, there may well be a change in perception now occurring among the voters toward the players of the steroid era — more tolerance perhaps for the drug transgressions of the past — and it may eventually result in Bonds and Clemens being honored. But nothing about this year’s voting results should be seen as anything approaching a watershed moment for either player.
Both, it should be noted, got a boost in support, at least in the voting percentages. Clemens was named on 45.2 percent of the ballots and Bonds was named on 44.3 percent after they finished at 37.5 and 36.8 in last year’s election.
But if you ignore the percentages, Clemens was named on 199 ballots this time and Bonds was on 195. Last year, Clemens was on 206 ballots and Bonds on 202. The year before that, Clemens was on 202 and Bonds on 198.
So the actual vote totals for Bonds and Clemens have not moved much in either direction in the past few years. What did change this time around was a purge of the voting ranks that the Hall of Fame carried out before the recent balloting. Writers who had not actively covered the game for more than 10 years were no longer eligible to vote.
That change, combined with some new writers becoming eligible, resulted in a reduction of 109 voters from the year before. So the net result was a small drop in the vote totals for each player and a modest spike in their voting percentages because fewer votes were cast over all. To a certain extent, one factor canceled out the other.
That, however, did not keep Clemens and a former teammate, Roy Halladay, from getting into a war of words after the vote totals were announced.
Halladay started things Wednesday by posting on Twitter: “When you use PEDs you admit your (sic) not good enough to compete fairly! Our nations past time should have higher standards! No Clemens no Bonds!”
Clemens, who was in the midst of his second consecutive Cy Young season for Toronto (and fifth of seven overall) when Halladay came up from the minors in 1998, responded with a statement to a television station in Texas.
“What is disheartening is getting a call or a text from family or friends about an ill-informed player making an asinine statement,” the statement said in part.
Clemens went on to say Halladay himself had once been accused of using amphetamines by the Blue Jays’ “strength coach,” an apparent reference to Brian McNamee, who later became Clemens’ chief accuser. “You should be very careful when putting tweets out while not having your facts on the matter at hand,” Clemens said.
Halladay responded on Twitter on Thursday morning, saying, “I’ll let my reputation speak for itself.”
Halladay last played in 2013, so it will be a while before he is on a Hall of Fame ballot. As for Bonds and Clemens, the question remains whether they might eventually have a real shot at being elected to the Hall because new, younger writers joining the voting bloc will be more willing to cast votes for both of them.
Well, maybe. Thanks to the yeoman work of Ryan Thibodaux, who runs a website dedicated to tracking Hall of Fame ballots that writers make public, we have been given a glimpse of the sentiment toward Bonds and Clemens among first-time voters. Of the 271 ballots (61.6 percent of the 440) that were cast this time and made public, nine were submitted by writers eligible to vote for the first time, and the results were not that strong for either Bonds or Clemens.
The group of new voters showed a great deal of enthusiasm for Tim Raines — all nine voted for Raines, a former Montreal Expos star, who fell 23 votes short of election in his second-to-last season of eligibility — but Bonds and Clemens each appeared on only five of the ballots. That suggests that younger voters may be somewhat more supportive of Bonds and Clemens, but not to the degree needed to get them into the Hall.
As the years go by, the new voting rules will result in still more older writers being declared ineligible to vote, and younger writers will continue to join the ranks, which indeed might benefit players associated with performance-enhancing drugs.
But that change will be gradual, and nowhere near as drastic as this time around.
Meanwhile, Bonds and Clemens have just six more years of eligibility. Based on the current size of the voting pool, they will need to persuade about 130 more writers to vote for them. The clock is ticking.
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