Why Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame
I know what many people are thinking when they read this title, and its along the lines of, “He cheated”. Now I know, Barry Bonds played in and took part in the height of the “Steroid Era”, the time period from the 90's all the way into the early 2000’s where more players than ever before were using PED’s (Performance Enhancing Drugs). Bonds along with players like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire (and many others) took the game of baseball and made regular season games look like they were Home Run Derby’s. These three players were hitting 60 home runs a year like it was easy, in fact it was incredible difficult, as no player has done it since (Alex Rodriguez hit 57 in 2002 and Giancarlo Stanton hit 59 in 2017) and it might not happen ever again. The MLB has become very strict on the use of steroids since the “Steroid Era”, such as random drug tests becoming more frequent and every player has to take a drug test when they report for Spring Training.Then throughout the season players are selected at random for more tests.The MLB and its commissioner, Rob Manfred, don’t want to be apart of another “Steroid Era” and honestly I don’t blame them, as much fun as it is to watch players hit home runs on what feels like every game, it’s not a good example to set to the fans and especially young kids watching the game. I’m only 20, so I remember growing up watching players like Derek Jeter, Robinson Cano, and Jimmy Rollins and i would have been devastated to find out that they cheated, because everything I watched them do would feel like a lie and that the only way to win was to cheat.
Now after all that, what Bonds was doing in the late 90’s was some of the best displays of hitting anyone has ever seen. I never had the privilege to watch Bonds during his actual playing time, but with the power of YouTube, I have been able to watch him and his swing. I don’t know what a perfect baseball swing is, but if I had to pick the most beautiful swing to watch I would without a doubt pick Bonds’s. The way his arms moved so quickly it felt like a pitcher could throw 150 mph and Bonds would still find a way to get his bat through the zone in time.
From the years 1999–2004, while the popular sitcom Friends was airing Thursdays on NBC and everybody thought the world was going to end, Barry Bonds was playing the greatest baseball of his life and arguably the greatest 5 season stretch of any player ever. Bonds posted a 55 WAR ( Wins Above Replacement, a stat used to sum up a players total contributions to his team), hit .328 with 292 home runs, 672 RBI’s and 945 walks ! Bonds led the league in walks from 2000–2004 and he has almost 400 more career walks than Ricky Henderson who has the second highest (Bonds’s 2,558 to Henderson’s 2,190). I remember one of the first Bonds videos I watched was a game played on May 28th, 1998. Bonds’s team, the San Francisco Giants were down by 2 runs in the bottom of the Ninth inning to the Arizona Diamondbacks and they had loaded the bases for none other than Barry Bonds. Now Barry Bonds got intentionally walked a lot in his career, because he was just so feared and it was much more worth it to teams to just put him on first base so that he couldn’t hit a home run. Now the Diamondbacks did what no team had ever done and has done since, they decided to intentionally walk Barry Bonds. The Diamondbacks would have rather give the Giants one run and make it a one run game then to even give Bonds a chance to hit a home run. The funny thing about that game and that decision is that it worked, the next batter, Brent Mayne, came to the plate and he lined out to right field.
Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame, I think that it will happen one day, as the voters have already let in players like Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez and Jeff Bagwell who never admitted to using steroids but were widely suspected of doing them. Bonds has the 4th highest WAR of all time with 162.8, he has the most walks and intentional walks of all time, he has the 6th highest RBI and Slugging percentage total of all time, hit .298 for his career and hmm I feel like I’m missing something… what could it be ? Oh yeah, Barry Bonds hit 762 Home Runs. Barry Bonds hit more home runs than anybody else in the history of the sport, as he broke Hank Aaron’s 31 year record of 755 home runs on August 7th, 2007.
Looking at Barry Bonds’s stats always brings a smile to my face, but at the same time it makes me kind of sad, because Bonds still doesn’t have his name written down in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Yes, you are right, He cheated, but i think one day the voters for the Hall of Fame are gonna look back on Barry Bonds and realize he should have his name in the history books along side the likes of Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Ken Griffey Jr.
