Photo: David Paul Morris
Doug Gottlieb: “There is a new movement to get Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens into the Baseball Hall of Fame… The younger generation believes Barry Bonds should be in and the younger generation is completely ill-informed. You’ll get people who say ‘STEROIDS WEREN’T ILLEGAL!’ That’s not true. They didn’t have official tests for steroids, so it was an ‘on your honor’ sort of feel. There’s an entire generation of people who believe steroids weren’t illegal. That just frankly isn’t true. When you start the conversation with a lie it’s really hard to have a conversation. If you want to say ‘WELL, EVERYONE WAS DOING IT!’, would that work when you told your parents everyone was doing it? ‘If Johnny stood in traffic would you do it too??’ If it wasn’t wrong, do you know what Barry Bonds would say about steroid use? ‘Of course I used steroids, it wasn’t illegal, it wasn’t frowned upon, everybody used it, and it helped me.’ He’s never articulated such. His trainer went to jail covering for him. He did the ‘I never knowingly used steroids’ when everyone knew he was going to Balco for a reason, his head size grew, his production was better, and he wasn’t washed up but he was doing what most players in their 30’s do – fading off into the sunset. And then he went back to the most prodigious home run hitter we’ve ever seen. Tell me any profession where midway through your career you break one of the core rules of that profession by cheating, and then you expect to be rewarded as one of the all-time greats. Do you think they’re going to name buildings after Jordan Belfort and teach the ways of Jordan Belfort?? If there was a stock broker or finance Hall of Fame, Jordan Belfort wouldn’t be in it, would he? They can’t take away Bonds’ money, they can’t take away his records, the only thing you have left that matters to anybody is the Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame is full of guys who don’t have virtue, but this was a lack of virtue which directly affected his performance, and also screwed up how we look at the entire rest of baseball. You have people spreading this story that steroids weren’t illegal – OF COURSE it was illegal. If it wasn’t wrong then how come none of them have come out and said it wasn’t wrong? Because they all know it was wrong. Imagine if you found out that Tom Brady having the ability to play at 44-years-old was helped by performance-enhancing drugs? It would nullify the last ten years of his career. Why doesn’t it in baseball when the numbers are all that’s it’s about, and the numbers are completely skewed? If the steroids didn’t help then why aren’t the home run numbers what they used to be? Of course they help. He used them and it elongated his career, which kept hundreds of players out of the big leagues, it completely changed how we look at all-time numbers, and who’s in the Hall of Fame. It screwed up how we look at older players and the expectations of how they’re supposed to play like in their late-30’s. It’s fake, it’s phony, it’s not real, and it strikes at the core of what sports are about, which is ‘are you better than the other guy?’ through your work ethic, through your intelligence, through your hand-eye coordination, and through your own natural ability. Imaging going to your spouse and saying ‘At the end I cheated, but in the beginning I was a really good husband for 20 years!’ That doesn’t matter. Clemens and Bonds robbed Father Time but also robbed baseball. SHAME ON YOU, JEFF PASSAN, SHAME ON YOU. You’re a great reporter, not good, but SHAME ON YOU. ‘He belongs in the Hall of Fame, it’s a museum’… Tell me a museum that puts an artist in it who cheated and somebody else did it, and still claims credit for it? Do you think it would hang in the museum?? ‘WELL, IT’S JUST S MUSEUM!’ Do we honor people in museums who have cheated to attain their success and have been proven to be cheaters? NO, and why would we do it with baseball? Because we liked home runs?”
Listen to Doug Gottlieb call out MLB writers who are active voters for the Baseball Hall of Fame who have recently gone public voicing their support for Barry Bonds making his way into Cooperstown, despite Bonds perhaps going down as the most recognizable and synonymous alleged cheater in sports history.
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