If you caught Wednesday’s edition of Schein on Sports, you heard Adam Schein go off on the writers with a ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame that chose not to give their vote to Barry Bonds.
He described that group as “hey-look-at-me gatekeepers” and declared that they are “everything that is wrong with our industry.”
The Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2022 class will only include David Ortíz. The Red Sox slugger was the only eligible player to receive more than the required 75% of votes for induction. Bonds received 66%. He and Roger Clemens are among those that did not get in after ten seasons of eligbility. That means their names will come off the writers’ ballots in the future. If they are inducted, it will be by their peers on the Today’s Game Committee.
Bonds and Clemens have both been tied to performance enhancing drugs in the past. That is the moral objection some writers have to voting them into the Hall of Fame. Adam Schein reminded his listeners that Ortíz was tied to the same thing.
“Let me let you in on a little secret because I’ve been teasing this for five years after Big Papí retired. The fact that David Ortíz got in on the first ballot with a steroid taint and Clemens and Bonds didn’t get in is disgusting,” he said. “It’s disturbing. It’s wrong.”
Schein was adamant that Ortíz is worthy of induction, but given that he has the same issues Bonds does, the reason Ortíz got in and Bonds didn’t is clearly because Ortíz “knows how to work a room.”
In closing, Schein said this felt very personal to him. At 44 years old, Bonds and Clemens were part of the majority of his favorite years in baseball.
“Don’t you dare, you fraudulent, hack gatekeepers, don’t you dare tell me my era of baseball didn’t exist.”
