After failing to earn a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame via the traditional route, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens had another path to gain entrance to Cooperstown.
That was via the Contemporary Baseball Era Players Committee, a 16-person panel that had eight players to consider in Sunday’s balloting. Bonds, MLB’s career home run leader with 762, and Clemens, who has won the most Cy Young Awards with seven, have been iced out of the Hall by the Baseball Writers Association of America due to their connections to performance-enhancing drugs.
That did not change Sunday with a smaller and perhaps friendlier group of voters that included current Hall of Famers, executives and historians. Bonds and Clemens failed to earn the required 12 votes from the 16 people casting ballots. Each voter could select up to three candidates.
Instead, the committee voted in Jeff Kent, MLB’s all-time leader among second basemen for home runs. Kent was the 2000 NL MVP with the San Francisco Giants as he put up a .334/.424/.596 slash line with 33 homers and 125 RBIs.