Not as great – Assessing Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens without the PED factor
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Mark Fainaru-Wada
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T.J. Quinn
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ESPN Staff Writer- T.J. Quinn joined ESPN in November 2007 as an investigative reporter for ESPN’s Enterprise Unit, which is charged with developing long-form, investigative features to be presented across multiple platforms.
THIS IS IT for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the end of the road on the steroid-driven debate about their Baseball Hall of Fame worthiness. Or unworthiness.
It’s their last of 10 years of eligibility with voters from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and ballots are due by the end of this month. If Bonds and Clemens don’t get at least 75% of votes this time, they’ll need special dispensation from a select committee to join legends like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Cy Young, let alone their own contemporaries, superstars like Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson.
By the numbers, both would have been first-ballot Hall of Famers; Bonds for being among the greatest players to don a baseball uniform, and Clemens for a 24-year career that generated 354 wins and seven Cy Young Awards. But enough voters have decided that the players’ relationships with performance-enhancing drugs are disqualifying.
So we wondered: Just how much did their presumed drug use affect their career numbers?
How many home runs would Bonds actually have hit in 2001? That’s the first year he used a concoction of drugs obtained through the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) — and the season he demolished the single-season home run record by blasting 73. Or, what about Clemens’ remarkable 2004 season? That’s when, in the year he turned 42, Clemens went 18-4, struck out 218 batters and posted a 2.98 ERA on the way to his seventh Cy Young Award.
Meet baseball stats guru Dan Szymborski, the creator of the…
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Source : espn
