Yankees Hall of Fame writers grapple with Barry Bonds

Yankees writers have already cast their votes for the HoF. Soon the baseball world will see the results. And a reflection of ourselves.

Yankees’ writers, at least the lucky few, get to vote on the MLB Hall of Fame. It’s a reward well deserved for dedicating at least a decade to covering baseball.

Some of them voted for Barry Bonds, and other reported PED users. It is likely that more voted for them than last year. I write today against that trend.

But before we proceed, I want to make it clear that everyone who was involved is under the same ban: Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez and Andy Pettitte should never be allowed into the HoF. This is not about Barry Bonds or any one single player.

Those men made their choices. Their legacies are written. No, this is about the voters and their own legacies, the ones they are currently writing.

We live in an immoral world. I understand that. I’ve even contributed to that immorality, at times. And it can be easy to lose your moral compass. We ask the same questions the Greeks did, in a Hellenistic age: What does it mean to be a good person when you feel lost in a larger and corrupt world?

The answer was as simple then as it is today: If you want to live in a moral world, a better world, if you want to be a good man, then simply make good, moral choices.

I know that can seem amorphous and esoteric to some in Yankees universe. Instead, let me give two very real-world examples.

Falling in a Wells

Back in 2007-2008, banks and investors finally crashed the system they had gamed for so long. They sneered and winked their way through their immoral banking world, reminding each other that others had done far worse before them.

As always in an economic crisis, the banks stopped loaning money. And without loans, the economy cannot crank up again. So the government called all the big banking heads together and almost forced them to accept a massive bailout.

One CEO objected, that of Wells Fargo. In a Rafael Palmeiro moment, newly appointed John Stumpf declared that his institution was run properly, had done nothing wrong, and was flush with cash. Wells’ prestige rose, and the bank’s reputation became pristine.

Coup De Foudre

Flash forward to October 12, 2016. It has been found that Wells, at least under Stumpf and possibly for a long time before, had been creating false accounts in existing customers names, ripping them and the entire system off to the tune of millions of dollars.

That’s why they were so flush with cash.

To Yankees writers who support players such as Mr. Bonds, Stumpf must be a hero. They would put him in the CEO Hall of Fame. After all, other people in banking cheated before him. And look at how successful he was.

The general public reacted differently. Outrage ensued from customers and non-alike, Congress excoriated Stumpf in multiple hearings, and the stockholders and Board of Directors insisted he resign, which he did.

Some might point out that he was not punished and was in fact given a “golden parachute.” That’s true. But no one is asking that Mr. Bonds be punished, just not rewarded any further.

And Mr. Bonds is today a multi-millionaire who splits his time between a private community in which the wages of sin pay for his peaceful life, and hanging with Karl Malden on the streets of San Francisco.

There, he’s more likely to get high-fived than harangued. That might not be a golden parachute, but it’s still a pretty soft landing.

One more, just for emphasis.

But Everyone’s Doing It

In 1972, Richard Nixon was the President and wanted to remain so. He successfully ran for re-election against Democratic opponents who comically cratered. His first opponent had to drop out after a series of gaffes, and his replacement was not as good. Nixon won easily.

But during the campaign, two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, discovered something wrong. They followed the evidence, writing sometimes daily columns for the Washington Post and its brave owner Katharine Graham.

There was never a criminal case, but the evidence for corruption and cheating seemed overwhelming. Using the civil standard, as opposed to the criminal one, I find Mr. Nixon guilty from my seat in the court of public opinion.

To those who support Mr. Bonds, Nixon belongs on Mount Rushmore. After all, he was a political Hall of Famer before he ever decided to cheat, having been a two-term vice-president and already a one-term President by 1972.

And I’m not being facetious. Supporters of Nixon today will defend him on the basis of the greatness of his other actions. They will remind you that he prolonged the Vietnam war to split Russia and China, what he and Kissinger called Triangular Diplomacy.

What he wanted from Russia was a better arms deal, and from China, a better trade deal. His plan worked, and he got both. And America has been better off for the last 40 years because of it.

To me, that is still an immoral decision.

To them, and to some who will write history, his condemnation and forced abdication for cheating an election, a tradition that stretches back as far as elections themselves, was ridiculous. I suspect some in Mr. Bonds’ camp feel the same way.

Opinions Cannot Be Wrong

But that’s not how the American people reacted. Even most of his supporters abandoned him, Congress began impeachment proceedings, and Nixon resigned in shame. He remains the only U.S. President to resign the office.

As a reminder, Mr. Bonds once played baseball at a Hall of Fame level. Then, as his skills should have been diminishing, he became a much bigger, stronger hitter. Two reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle, felt there might be something wrong.

They not only wrote almost daily columns detailing the exact evidence stongly suggesting that Barry Bonds cheated the game, but also wrote a book about it, Game of Shadows. There was no criminal case, but neither were the reporters sued by Mr. Bonds for their allegations.

Using the civil standard of guilt, rather than the criminal one, my vote from this seat in the court of public opinion is guilty.

Some of you are sneering now and thinking these examples too extreme and not apt. Maybe that’s true.

What is Past is Prologue

I would encourage those of you to take a walk up to the Met. Go inside and turn left, where you’ll find their collection of ancient Greek art; muscular men and lithe ladies.

As you pass them, remember that this is not how the Greeks looked. Instead, they were made as ideals and placed in the rooms of their children, and pregnant mothers.

These statues were not reflections of society, but encouragements in it. The Greeks understood, as others did, that if they wanted to create a better society someday, it needed to start with the messages they send to each other, and the future citizens and decision makers.

As I wrote earlier, I know how easy it can be to get lost in an immoral world. And voting for the Hall of Fame really is a tempest in a teacup, compared to wars and bankruptcies and rigged elections.

But every step in the journey of life leads us to an exact destination. It’s just hard to know which individual steps to take sometimes. Out in the bright world where the lesson is so clearly that liers and cheaters do the best, it can be so easy to feel sorry for the suckers who still cling

to their out-dated values.

Ideas like two wrongs don’t make a right, and a friend and a cliff and what you might do if he plunged unexpectedly seem so old-fashioned. It’s true we live in a world of advanced metrics.

I’m Talking to You

For many of those, however, even they cannot escape the three am reckoning. It’s the time when there are no more distractions, and you come face to face with yourself. And the man you always wanted to be.

You know then, without ever saying it out loud, the things you wished you’d done right that day, but didn’t. And you admit you knew it then, even as you made decisions the type of which you knew your mother would not have approved.

But you quickly dismiss that slight gnawing feeling in your gut and go back to sleep, already hoping to be placed in some morally compromising position the next day, so that you can give in.

And that’s because you live in the tangible world, where the effects of your decisions are evident at hand. Things seem to be working out pretty good, don’t they? You’re a sportswriter and have been for a long time.

Maybe, standing as you are in our shared moral morass of a world, all that really matters is the play on the field. Morarilty? That’s an outdated concept, and nothing to do with baseball. Or me.

Next time, though, before you fall back to sleep, think of sailors. They, too, can find themselves adrift in the dark, and unsure what to do. But they know that although they cannot see true North, their compass can. So can yours.

And before you fall back asleep, repeat this simple phrase: Act as if you have faith, and faith will be granted to you. Act…as if you have faith…and faith…will be granted to you.

Because we can’t change the world, we live in. It was given to us by those who made decisions before us, and now we must make the best of it we can.