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Former Phillie Doug Glanville Provides Another Take on Why Barry Bonds Should Not Be in the Hall of Fame

Kyle Pagan

By Kyle Pagan

Published:

Photo Credit: Jack Gruber, USAT via Imagn Content Services, LLC

On Monday, Doug Glanville wrote an ESPN column on why he believes Barry Bonds should not be in the Hall of Fame, and the effect PEDs had on player’s careers who didn’t use steroids:

Glanville writes:

Watching so many of sports’ biggest superstars tweet their disappointment in the vote that kept Bonds out didn’t help. Eventually, I realized what many of them haven’t had to: The lines you draw are different when you are directly impacted by such rampant cheating. Not peripherally, not theoretically, but directly — in your contract negotiations, on the lineup card, on the depth chart, in the win column.

It is one thing to watch artificial domination on TV, marveling at the numbers it produced as if it is a magic show. It is another when you lose your job from it.

Eventually, I tried to put aside my anger at the tweets and the commentary. I ended up with a question: How can we celebrate anyone who clearly leveraged unfair advantages in order to win?

We want to enshrine these men? For what? For having a better pharmacist?

You can’t argue with his point. Plenty of ballplayers missed out on generational wealth for their families because other guys were juicing. Though if Glanville is going to ridicule the players, we should ridicule the league just as much for turning a blind eye and not implementing strict testing until 2006, sixteen years after Fay Vincent brought steroids to MLB’s attention.

I argue a lot that the Steroid Era saved baseball. That summer of Mark McGwire vs. Sammy Sosa, hitting moonshots over the Green Monster in Ken Griffey’s Slugfest, “Chicks dig the long ball,” and Bonds’ 73 home run season were all in a five year span. MLB certainly didn’t shy away from marketing their talent. McGwire had Andro, a banned steroid in the NFL, NCAA, and Olympics at the time, hanging out in his locker in front of fifty reporters during a home run race and it’s a non-story within a week. I still think steroid users should be in the Hall. Build a separate wing for them if you want to tell the history of their era like you do other eras before it. But to hold them out after everything they’ve contributed to the game good and bad, the money they’ve made for the league, and the money they have made for guys today doesn’t make sense to me. They’re part of the reason guys like Bryce Harper are able to make $300+ million and that can’t be taken away because they used something that was available to everyone at the time. You can argue Doug Glanville is a better person than Barry Bonds because he elected to play the game in what he thought was the right way, but I’m okay with anyone who says Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, or Roger Clemens belong in the HOF. Especially when the HOF continues to make money off of them by highlighting their achievements in display cases for people to see:

Look at this thing! It’s a bukkake of America! You could look at this and think Mark McGwire had a successful Presidential run after his career. This shrine is so over the top:

Why highlight achievements of players that are being blackballed from the HOF? Is it because you know you can’t sell tickets on the backs of Harold Baines, Edgar Martinez, and Larry Walker? –

My argument is probably generational, but I think if your job is to preserve the legacy of the game you can give the players who deserve it their praise while also telling the story of baseball. We do it with movies based on true events all the time.

Kyle Pagan
Kyle Pagan

Kyle writes blog posts and does Man on the Street-style videos all around Philadelphia. He graduated from Temple University (a basketball school) in 2015. contact: k.pagan@sportradar.com

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