Since mid-May, when Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred announced Pete Rose would be eligible for Hall of Fame consideration and explained his specious reasonings behind it, last week’s Hall of Fame vote by the 16-member Classic Era committee carried with it a certain air of inevitability for Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, the two greatest players currently not enshrined in Cooperstown.
Rose was championed by Donald Trump, who used his populism to demand the Hit King finally be allowed into the Hall, an honor denied Rose since 1989 when baseball placed him on the permanently ineligible list for betting on games when he managed the Cincinnati Reds. After Rose died in September 2024, Trump then won the presidency five weeks later and immediately increased the pressure on Manfred to end Rose’s 36-year banishment – despite the absence of any evidence suggesting Rose was any less guilty in death of gambling on the sport than he had been alive. Nevertheless, Manfred acquiesced to Trump, and in 2027, for the first time, Pete Rose will be eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame.
That specter of that capitulation, the brutish application of power has defined both the current political and cultural moment. Integrity has been as much under assault as democracy – it’s a word for wimps and hand-wringers. Accountability is for suckers – the ones too weak to get their own way, not man enough to take what they want. People feel numb, and with numbness comes surrender. Relentlessly battered by wanton presidential pardons, indifference to the deconstruction of stabilizing norms, all amid rampant oligarchal pillage – and it becomes seductive to embrace the warm cocoon of nihilism. Nobody cares. The President of the United States is after all, not anecdotally but legally, a convicted felon, but not only has this fact not been disqualifying, it is barely mentioned.
Whether its betting or NIL, the latest college scandal or labor, sports has been enveloped in its own waves of destabilization and numbness, fatigue and cynicism, and in the weeks leading up to the vote, Bonds and Clemens were expected to benefit from these sentiments. Beyond Trump’s America, the height of the PED scandal occurred nearly a quarter century ago, and the reflex that enough time has passed, each has paid a cost, and its time to close the chapter on the Steroid Era is a powerful and common one. Both Clemens and Bonds retired in 2007. Both fell off of the Baseball Writers Association of America’s writer’s ballot after a 10-year odyssey of discomfort. (Needing 75% of the votes for induction Bonds topped out at 66%, Clemens as 65.2%.) Both have been denied for nearly a decade and a half, and the sudden creation of a pathway for Rose seemed to provide sunlight for the simultaneously disgraced and legendary players of the Steroid Era – Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and possibly Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, too – to one day receive a reappraisal.
They did not. Neither was inducted. Both were rebuked, receiving less than the five votes required to be reconsidered in two years. Incidentally the one player elected, Jeff Kent, was a teammate of both Bonds (San Francisco, 1997-2002), and Clemens, (Houston, 2003-04). Many of the voters were former players, and the while they did not and have never doubted the greatness of Bonds, Clemens or the numbers they produced, they did, however, decide not to succumb to the creeping nihilism of today. It has its limits.
Ironically, the price of upholding the game’s integrity has been a week’s worth of ridicule. Kent has not been warmly embraced as the newest member of the immortal club, but proof that without Bonds and Clemens, the Hall of Fame is now a lesser place, less relevant, less legitimate place as long as Bonds and Clemens remain uninvited. He hit more home runs than any second baseman in history but must spend the next seven and a half months until the July induction ceremonies creating a protective scaffolding around his enshrinement, for the moment his guard drops, the conversation will shift away from him and back to Clemens, back to Bonds.
Pete Rose’s controversial candidacy for the Hall of Fame was championed by Donald Trump, who used his populism to demand the Hit King finally be allowed in. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
None of which is to suggest that the people who run baseball heroically protected the sport’s interest during a cynical time – that distinction belonged to the collection of 16 former players, executive and media, who have not forgiven the era – especially the former players, who may be accused of settling old scores, but also were brought up in the game with a hardline attitude toward gambling – its prohibition is the first sign on every clubhouse door – and steroids. Ex-players, especially at Hall of Fame level from the pre-1994 strike years, have been threatening to boycott induction ceremonies of known steroid users for two decades, and counting.
Manfred, meanwhile, is perfectly willing to embrace the times. In reversing the game’s prohibition on Rose, the commissioner reasoned that posthumously, Rose no longer posed any threat to the integrity of the sport. Under the same reasoning, Manfred also returned the Joe Jackson of the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox to the ballot, one of the game’s original casualties of betting on baseball. As part of the Black Sox, Jackson has been banned since 1920, and dead since 1951 – clearly posing no threat to the integrity of the game. Manfred has been commissioner for the past decade, but it was only when Trump pressured him on Rose did Manfred apply the same logic to Shoeless Joe.
Black players are disappearing from the sport. There was a higher percentage of African Americans in baseball in 1965 than there was in 2025, yet in currying favor to Trump and his attack on so-called “DEI”, the commissioner eliminated programs designed to improve those numbers it once said it was committed to – and profits from every 15 April, when it celebrates Jackie Robinson even as Black players are actively erased from the sport.
And there is no greater example of cynicism and greed in baseball than its top-rope leap headfirst into gambling – just like the other sports. The consequences are already emerging. The game’s greatest player, Shohei Ohtani, was involved in (and ultimately found to be the victim of) a gambling scandal, and one of the game’s best closer’s Cleveland’s Emmanuel Clase, is currently under investigation and may never pitch in the major leagues again.
Their baseball community peers choosing not to elect Bonds and Clemens is not a victory – if keeping them out is necessary, it is done so uncomfortably for no positive can be taken from the greatest pitcher and greatest hitter of their times never having their moment at the podium. Everyone has lost, and continues to do so – just as they have with Rose and do with Alex Rodriguez and his 3,115 hits and 696 home runs on the outside of enshrinement. The victory lies not in their banishment but – despite the eyerolls – in the brief rejection of cynicism, the rejection of the idea that history does not matter, that rules and standards do not matter, accountability is a nuisance, that nothing matters. The notion itself has always been something of an ahistorical misdirection designed to opiate dissidence, because neither Bonds nor Clemens, nor inclusion to Cooperstown has ever produced indifference. It’s always mattered. Last week’s vote was just the latest reminder.
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Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America, to be published by Mariner Books in January 2026.
