Barry Bonds has officially been shut out of the Hall of Fame after coming up short in his 10th and final year of eligibility. However, a close look at the final tally reveals just how close he came to actually making it.
The Baseball Writers’ Association of America announced on Tuesday that retired Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz had been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Ortiz was the only one of 30 candidates on this year’s ballot to receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold needed for induction.
Ortiz received 307 votes out of 394 total ballots submitted (77.9 percent). Bonds was the next highest vote-getter with 260 votes in his favor (66.0 percent). Here is the fully final vote count.
With 394 total ballots, Bonds needed to get 296 votes in order to reach the 75 percent threshold. That means he came just 36 votes shy of making the Hall of Fame.
MLB’s all-time home run king, Bonds was arguably the greatest hitter ever by many metrics. But he will forever be linked to performance-enhancing drugs, which is also true of others who fell short here in their final year of eligibility such as Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa. During his playing career, Bonds was notoriously standoffish with the media as well, which probably further damaged his case.
There were some signs that Hall of Fame voters were warming up to Bonds, who got as little as 34.7 percent of the vote in previous years of eligibility. While Bonds still got a solid amount of votes this year, it was not quite enough to get him into Cooperstown in his final crack at it.
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