WITHsince mid-May, when Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that Pete Rose will be eligible for Hall of Fame consideration And explained his plausible reasoning behind itThe Hall of Fame vote, conducted last week by the 16-member Classic Era committee, brought a certain air of inevitability for Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, two of the game's greatest players not currently enshrined in Cooperstown.
Rose was defended by Donald Trump, who used his populism to demand that the Hit King finally be allowed into the Hall. Rose has been stripped of that honor since 1989, when baseball placed him on its permanent ineligibility list while he was managing the Cincinnati Reds. After Rose died September 2024Five weeks later, Trump became president and immediately increased pressure on Manfred to end Rose's 36-year exile – despite the lack of any evidence that Rose was any less culpable in the sports gambling death than he was alive. However, Manfred conceded to Trump, and in 2027 Pete Rose will be eligible to be inducted into the Hall of Fame for the first time.
This specter of surrender, the brutal use of force, has defined both the current political and cultural moment. Honesty was as much under attack as democracy, a word used to describe weaklings and hand-wringers. Responsibility is for suckers—those who are too weak to get their way and not man enough to get what they want. People feel numb, and with numbness comes surrender. Mercilessly tormented by meaningless presidential pardons, indifference to the deconstruction of stabilizing norms, all against the backdrop of rampant oligarchic plunder, it becomes tempting to embrace the warm cocoon of nihilism. Nobody cares. After all, the President of the United States is not anecdotally, but legally, a convicted criminal, but this fact is not only not disqualifying, but is barely mentioned.
Whether it was bets or zero, the latest college scandal or unions, the sport was shrouded in waves of destabilization and numbness, fatigue and cynicism, and in the weeks leading up to the vote, Bonds and Clemens were expected to capitalize on those sentiments. Outside of Trump's America, the height of the PED scandal occurred nearly a quarter of a century ago, and the message that enough time has passed, everyone has paid for it, and it's time to close the chapter on the steroid era is powerful and pervasive. Both Clemens and Bonds retired in 2007. Baseball Writers Association of America writers' vote after a 10-year odyssey of discomfort. (The 75% vote requirement for introductory bonds exceeded 66%, with Clemens at 65.2%). Both had been denied for nearly a decade and a half, and the sudden creation of a path for Rose seemed to give sunlight to both disgraced and legendary players of the Steroid Era – Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield and perhaps also Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa – to one day be re-evaluated.
They didn't. None of them were inducted. Both were rebuked after receiving fewer than the five votes needed to review the decision in two years. Incidentally, the only player selected, 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 although they did not and never doubted the greatness of Bonds, Clemens or the numbers they achieved, they nevertheless decided not to succumb to the creeping nihilism of today. It has its limits.
Ironically, the price of maintaining the integrity of the game was a whole week of ridicule. Kent was not warmly received as the newest member of the immortal club, but it is proof that without Bonds and Clemens, the Hall of Fame is now a less important, less relevant and less legitimate place as long as Bonds and Clemens remain uninvited. He hit more home runs than any second baseman in history, but he'll have to spend the next seven-and-a-half months before July's induction ceremony scaffolding his temple because the moment his guard is down, the conversation will move from him to Clemens and then back to Bonds.
None of this is to say that the people who run baseball have heroically championed the sport's interests in a cynical time – that honor belonged to a group of 16 former players, executives and media members who have not forgiven the era – especially former players who can be accused of settling old scores, but who were also raised in the game with a hard-line attitude towards gambling – its ban is the first sign on every clubhouse door – and steroids. Former players, especially those at the Hall of Fame level even before the 1994 strike, have been threatening to boycott induction ceremonies for known steroid users for two decades, and their numbers continue to grow.
Meanwhile, Manfred is completely ready to move with the times. In lifting the ban on Rose, the commissioner judged that posthumously Rose no longer posed any threat to the integrity of the sport. For the same reason, Manfred also brought back Joe Jackson from the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox on the ballot, one of the first victims of baseball betting. Jackson has been banned from the Black Sox since 1920 and dead since 1951, clearly not a threat to the integrity of the game. Manfred has been commissioner for the last decade, but it wasn't until Trump pressured him over Rose that Manfred applied the same logic to Shoeless Joe.
Black players are disappearing from the sport. The percentage of African-Americans in baseball was higher in 1965 than it is in 2025, but by kowtowing to Trump and his attacks on so-called “DEI,” the commissioner has eliminated programs aimed at improving the numbers he once said he was striving for — and profits from every April 15th he celebrates Jackie Robinson, even as black players are actively being pushed out of the sport.
And there is no better example of baseball's cynicism and greed than its headlong plunge into gambling—as in other sports. The consequences are already showing. The greatest player in the game Shohei Ohtaniwas involved in (and ultimately became the victim of) a gambling scandal, and one of Cleveland's best players, Emmanuel Claeys, is currently under investigation and may never make it to the big leagues again.
Their peers in the baseball community choosing not to elect Bonds and Clemens is not a victory: keeping them out is so awkward because you can't get any positive results out of the greatest pitcher and greatest hitter of his time who never made it to the podium. Everyone lost and continues to do so – just like they did with Rose and Alex Rodriguez with his 3,115 hits and 696 home runs outside the temple. The victory lies not in kicking them out, but—despite the eye-rolling—in briefly abandoning cynicism, abandoning the idea that history doesn't matter, that rules and standards don't matter, that accountability is a nuisance, that nothing matters. The idea itself has always been something of an ahistorical delusion designed to opiate dissent, because neither Bonds nor Clemens nor inclusion in Cooperstown ever inspired indifference. His 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, which will be published by Mariner Books in January 2026.
