Absent an outright ban, it makes no sense to keep Barry Bonds out of baseball’s Hall of Fame

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Over the last five years, Shohei Ohtani has been at or near the top in every offensive statistical category in baseball. It’s not just numbers. It’s aura. Whenever you hear that Michael Bublé showtune he plays as his walk-up music, you get a feeling.

If the Japanese star maintains that best-by-a-country-mile pace for 10 or 12 more years, into his early 40s, he might be the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. Until then, it’s still Barry Bonds.

We forget how much Bonds terrified opponents, and for how long. When he was 39, he was intentionally walked 120 times in a single season. Last year, the international walk leader, Aaron Judge, had 36.

But once again, and apparently for the final time, Bonds has been denied entry into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Jeff Kent elected to Baseball Hall of Fame; Bonds, Clemens once again denied

This situation had grown so impossible to explain that the Hall has had to create another layer of bureaucracy to insulate themselves from the possibility of having to do so. The members of the Baseball Writers Association of America barred Bonds. Now a higher cadre of initiates – the contemporary baseball era committee – has also closed the door.

On Sunday, the results of that vote by that panel of 16, including former Canadian great Fergie Jenkins, were announced.

Bonds’ teammate Jeff Kent got 14 votes and made the hall. In Kent’s best season, he had a 1.021 OPS. Bonds did that or better 13 times.

Bonds’ exact vote total was not announced, only that he received fewer than five. That means he will not be considered again.

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Forget about Robin. It’s like naming Alfred to the crime-fighting hall of fame, and snubbing Batman.

Bonds made two mistakes that have gotten us here. The first was being dislikeable. I dealt with him only once and that was one of my least pleasant interactions with another human being, never mind an athlete. And I’ve sold encyclopedias door to door.

The second mistake was giving everyone he’d treated like a jerk a way to get back at him.

It has not been proved that Bonds knowingly did PEDs around the time that everyone else was doing them. However, two things suggest he did – a pile of circumstantial evidence, including a court case that ended in mistrial, plus the fact that his head kept growing into his middle 30s.

So fine, no one thinks he’s on the up and up. That doesn’t change what he did.

There is a weird drive toward moralizing erasure in sports that I’ve never quite gotten. Like the time the sports bureaucrats decided Ben Johnson hadn’t just cheated his way to the 100-metre world record, but that he hadn’t done it at all. But he did do it. Hundreds of millions of people saw him.

Baseball people would love to scratch out Bonds’ milestones – specifically his single season home run record (73) – and start over. But there isn’t a good enough sounding reason to do so. Instead, they never, ever talk about it.

If the Hall wants to strike Bonds from consideration, that’s fine by me. Then they should do that. Say out loud what their proxies mean when they skip over him – ‘I don’t like the guy, and I really feel like he cheated, though I can’t prove it.’

The Hall itself could make up a reason. It’s been too long, or we have our own process to define “cheating” and here it is and he meets the criteria and we’ll make sure to apply it the same way to everyone else. Something. Just pretend there is a process in place, rather than a rolling series of vibes.

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If you’re not prepared to do any of that, and still insist on barring him, then the Hall of Fame makes no sense.

Off the top of my head, I can think of maybe five guys who could stand in Bonds’ shoes from the perspective of total accomplishment – Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams and Ty Cobb. And at least a couple of them were all-time jerks, too.

Without a proper explanation of why Bonds is excluded, we can see the Hall for what it is – a popularity contest unbound by rigour. It is ridiculous.

The only intellectually defensible redoubt is the gauziness of the Hall’s criteria for inclusion – “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”

Three out of five of these things are so subjective as to be meaningless. I define integrity as someone who slugs for their friends no matter what they’ve done. You may not agree. Neither of us is necessarily correct, but I hope we’d agree that we don’t have the right to judge the way others see it. Asking people to rate the “integrity” of strangers is perverse.

All any of us know for certain is that Bonds is the best hitter ever. And don’t Babe Ruth me. When the Babe was playing, the same pitcher threw the whole game, rarely more than 90 mph and there was nothing we’d currently call a slider or a change-up. Ruth was hitting batting practice compared to Bonds.

All that said, it pleases me that this obvious error won’t be fixed. First, it’s not like some great injustice is being done. If Bonds feels like he’s been cut by baseball, he can afford to buy some friends.

Better, it puts the lie to baseball’s quest for digital perfection. If they can only find the right inputs, and the right ways to input them, they could take the people out of sports entirely. They could moneyball a player or a game or an era into real life, entirely from the numbers.

Except the Bonds case proves that the pettiness of men, our ability to kid ourselves, our urge to rationalize, our need to punish, is so limitless that it can never be counted.