An interesting confluence of sentences.
Bonds will be on the 2013 ballot alongside other players with a steroid paper trail: Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa. Another name to consider: Mike Piazza.
Based purely on their numbers, it would be silly to have a Hall of Fame without Bonds and Clemens, the game’s best hitter and pitcher in decades. Their link to performance-enhancing drugs changes everything, however, and their Hall of Fame candidacies might have taken a further hit with today’s results.
via What does HOF vote mean for Barry Bonds? : SFGate: San Francisco Giants : The Splash.
I honestly always appreciated Piazza more as a person than a player. He was always a straight-up guy and seemed pretty grounded. As a player, he had the rock star quality, but in any given situation, I’d rather Alfonzo have the bat in his hands.
That said, we’re talking about a umpteenth-round draft pick that swung only with his arms and became the best-hitting catcher in the history of the game, so there’s certainly plenty of reason for suspicion. On the other hand, Piazza didn’t have an especially long career, never won an MVP, and really only meant what he meant to his own team and its fans, so even if he did juice, he’s still not in the same category as Bonds or Clemens in terms of the shadow he cast.
The whole issue is sticky, no way around it. One big question is who was originally cheating vs. who was just trying to keep up with those who were. If I know certain pitchers in my division are ‘roided up, do I just shrug my shoulders about the unfairness of it all, or do I do what I need to do to even things out? I once heard someone on MLB Home Plate hypothesize that Bonds only got on the juice after he saw erstwhile nobodies like Sosa becoming folk heroes and signing big contracts.
The only thing we can ask is that the voters decide what their own criteria is going to be and stick with it from player to player and ballot to ballot.