Padecky: Hall of Fame voters made right call on Barry Bonds

It’s a cute phrase. Fell in love with it the first time I heard it over 30 years ago. It came from a man that, as his personality and character unfolded for me over the decades, I came to respect more than anyone I would ever meet in professional baseball.

“If you ain’t cheatin’,” Dusty Baker said, “you ain’t tryin’.”

Amazin’, isn’t it, how that phrase now claims a more serious interpretation that it ever has. Cute, 30-40 years ago, meant watering down the base paths to slow down the best base stealer of his time, Maury Wills. Cute meant letting the infield grass grow high, so even a bad bunt would take its time to a fielder, if it got there at all. Cute meant pitcher Gaylord Perry playing Where’s Waldo with the umpires, as they examined a Gaylord baseball for saliva or thumbtacks or a socket wrench.

I once walked through a clubhouse and saw a huge plastic bowl at the entrance to the showers. In it was what looked like green Mike and Ike’s. My, that’s lot of candy. A very famous player came by and scooped up a handful and shoved them in his mouth. Oh my, I mentioned to a beat writer of that team, he sure was hungry.

The beat writer looked at me like I had spaghetti coming out of my nose. “Those are greenies,” he said. “Didn’t you know?” Greenies, amphetamines, so necessary to get through those August dog days. Performance enhancer? Nope. Just kept the player awake enough to remember what inning it was.

It was a wink-and-a-nod time. Cute not only was accepted but encouraged. Getting the competitive advantage through trickery was all the rage and had so much charm. Made for terrific whispers. Rarely did anyone accuse another, knowing they all were swimming in the same swimming hole. Oh, look at that, someone is stealing the catcher’s signs from center field. Cool. We got to learn to do that.

And then it happened. Major League Baseball abandoned cute for money. Greenies were out. Greenbacks were in. Attendance was dropping, interest drooping. The 1994 strike happened. Fans were angry. They didn’t like the greed. Little did they know the avarice was just beginning.

Sports fans like distance. It’s a commonality all sports share. See Steph Curry shooting the treys. See Patrick Mahomes using that golden arm for that 80-yarder. See Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit so many home runs in 1998 it was like they were playing a video game.

The home run was the delete key Bud Selig, the commissioner at the time, used to make people forgive, forget and move past the ’94 strike. It was the deal Selig made with the Devil. Wow the fans with the long ball and, oh yes, don’t get too curious why so many balls have the arc of a rainbow. The people are coming back, returning with their money.

So while there has been much debate on who should be in baseball’s Hall of Fame, there is one man most undeserving. Bug, I mean Bud Selig and his blinders should never have made it to Cooperstown. Four years after Selig retired, 20 years after the first balloon muscles appeared, baseball’s still cleaning up his mess.

Meaning: Should Barry Bonds, who has more home runs than anyone in history, get into the Hall of Fame? A simple question. The answer prompts a variety of high-spirited responses. No! Hell no! Maybe with an asterisk. Maybe with a syringe. Maybe with a confession. Maybe with an apology. Yes! Hell yes! Leave me alone; this is giving me a headache.

What is clear: Baseball isn’t cute anymore when it comes to cheating. Nothing cute and cuddly about needles and rubbing the “secret sauce” on forearms and injecting chemicals into the buttocks. When you go from a team having chemistry to players having a chemist, cuddly left the building around 1998.

“Integrity, sportsmanship, character” are the key ingredients listed in Rule 5 of the Hall of Fame voting requirements. If those criteria were followed to their exact definitions, there might be enough Hall of Famers to fill a school bus. So, yes, Cooperstown judgment has shown to be quite flexible, myopic and, quite frankly, forgivable.

Do we forgive Bonds, not for his prickly behavior, but for his admitting he used “the cream?” Yes, that was only liniment and I’m a Chinese aviator. The before and after pictures of his profile engendered this response: I hope his muscles don’t explode.

The argument that he was a Hall of Famer before he became the Michelin Man misses a key piece of logic. A student is acing a test but one question stumps him. He gets the answer from a classmate. Teacher catches him. He is disqualified for cheating. In his greed for a better grade, he suffers the same fate as the man who gets greedy because he wants to be the best home run hitter in baseball.

The student didn’t need to cheat. Neither did the baseball player. But both individuals did. There’s a price to pay for that. Inflated arms and inflated statistics belong in the Hall of Shame. To permit performance enhancers, oddly, is to get whimsical - a fine baseball tradition. Go back in time and think of Babe Ruth on steroids. Yes the Babe’s arms would be as big as his belly. I dare you to go to sleep with that image bouncing around your brain like a pinball.

So cheating does matter. Otherwise we’ll have shortstops looking like Hercules and baseball stadiums feeling like an airport runway. I don’t see any romance in that, in grandpa bouncing little Bobby on his knee, saying: “Sonny, you should have been there the day the ball hit a 747.”

To comment, write to bobpadecky@gmail.com.