FTW: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will make Hall, so deal with it
Look: This site, and in particular this author, has already spilled way, way too many words explaining why Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens deserve entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I have no particular interest in repeating myself more than I already have, so if you're fired up over the mere possibility of their enshrinement and want something to rail against, please go here or here or here or here. To summarize, for those too lazy to click: The Hall of Fame should be for celebrating great baseball players, not necessarily great men, everything Bonds and Clemens did on baseball fields still counts in the record books, and their performance-enhancing indiscretions came during an era in which the Major League Baseball and Hall of Fame commissioner Bud Selig did next to nothing to police them.
This post is not about that, though. This post exists to share this fact: Bonds and Clemens are going to get in. It's happening. Both players fell well short of election in 2017, their fifth season on the ballot. But for the second straight year, both Clemens and Bonds saw big spikes in their balloting totals and, perhaps most importantly, 13 out of the 14 new Hall of Fame voters who made their ballots public voted for Bonds and Clemens both. Hall voting privileges come with 10 years' tenure in the Baseball Writers Association of America, and presumably the high totals for Bonds and Clemens among new voters reflects the voting tendencies of younger baseball writers who came of age watching Bonds and Clemens in their primes and seeing how awesome they were.
It's almost impossible to understand how a voter could justify voting for Bonds and not Clemens or vice versa, as both players stand among the most valuable in the game's history and both represent the faces of the sport's so-called "steroids era." But Bonds landed on 53.8% of ballots this year and Clemens on 54.1%, and historical trends show that players who get at least 50% of votes almost always end up enshrined by the end of their run on the ballot. To date, only Gil Hodges, Jack Morris and, now, Lee Smith have ever appeared on more than half of all ballots in any given year and not ultimately made the Hall. Curt Schilling may eventually join them, but it won't be because of his actual merits (or lack thereof) as a baseball player.
Moreover, Bonds and Clemens have both seen strong upticks in balloting from veteran voters in recent years. On ballots made public, Bonds gained 22 net votes from returning voters and Clemens gained 23. As debate over their candidacy rages on, more and more voters seem to be coming around to a logical conclusion: Because it's impossible to fully know which players from their era took steroids and which didn't, it's silly to punish only those that got caught and reward their contemporaries for managing to maintain a clean reputation. And it's patently absurd for the Hall of Fame to continue including a "character clause" when Cooperstown already includes plenty of straight-up bad dudes (not to mention countless guys who used amphetamines to enhance their performance), and when baseball writers - this one most certainly included - are not in any way qualified to judge others for the quality of their character.
It's going to happen: Unless the Hall itself intervenes in some way, Bonds and Clemens are going to get in, perhaps within the next two years. And once you're done wringing your hands about it, maybe celebrate the fact that the two best players of their era will be represented in Cooperstown just like all the tainted superstars of yesteryear, and that fans of a certain generation - my generation, as it happens - may again recognize the Hall of Fame as a worthwhile Mecca of baseball greatness and not an arbitrary pageant hellbent on excluding Barry Freaking Bonds and all 762 of his dope homers.
People will lament their entry as an indication of our society's loosening moral standards and its inability to distinguish right from wrong, and we'll all be forced to endure some livid and pointless takes trumpeting bygone Golden Ages of baseball integrity that never really existed. But in truth, their well-deserved inclusion in the pantheon of baseball greats will mean a victory for logic and our understanding of humanity, and the surest way to keep Cooperstown relevant to all of us who grew up appreciating the incredible on-field achievements of the two most valuable players of the past half-century.