The Case for Barry Bonds in the Hall of Fame PDF Download

Author: K. P. Wee
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books LLC
ISBN: 1626015813
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
"Barry Bonds is a Hall of Famer. At some point, the best players of their era have to be enshrined. Period. It’s part of our game’s history." —Trevor Bauer, 2020 National League Cy Young Award Winner Sportswriter K. P. Wee asks the question that many MLB fans have been thinking—Should Barry Bonds be in the Baseball Hall of Fame? In his 22 years in the Major Leagues, Bonds, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the San Francisco Giants, was: - the All-time Home Run leader with 762 home runs - a seven-time MVP - a 14-time All-Star - an eight-time Gold Glove winner As the final year to vote this home run king in begins, The Case for Barry Bonds in the Baseball Hall of Fame looks at his stunning career from all aspects including his personal life as the son of a baseball legend, as well as never-before told stories of his generosity and mentorship towards other ballplayers. The book also looks at the stories of his distaste for the sports press, as well as the role of racism in professional sports, and how this impacted his career. Join sportswriter K. P. Wee as he shares insights and interviews from baseball insiders, Hall of Fame voters and baseball legends, as he puts to rest the question “Does Barry Bonds belong in the Baseball Hall of Fame?”

Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110121676X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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In the summer of 1998 two of baseball leading sluggers, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, embarked on a race to break Babe Ruth’s single season home run record. The nation was transfixed as Sosa went on to hit 66 home runs, and McGwire 70. Three years later, San Francisco Giants All-Star Barry Bonds surpassed McGwire by 3 home runs in the midst of what was perhaps the greatest offensive display in baseball history. Over the next three seasons, as Bonds regularly launched mammoth shots into the San Francisco Bay, baseball players across the country were hitting home runs at unprecedented rates. For years there had been rumors that perhaps some of these players owed their success to steroids. But crowd pleasing homers were big business, and sportswriters, fans, and officials alike simply turned a blind eye. Then, in December of 2004, after more than a year of investigation, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams broke the story that in a federal investigation of a nutritional supplement company called BALCO, Yankees slugger Jason Giambi had admitted taking steroids. Barry Bonds was also implicated. Immediately the issue of steroids became front page news. The revelations led to Congressional hearings on baseball’s drug problems and continued to drive the effort to purge the U.S. Olympic movement of drug cheats. Now Fainaru-Wada and Williams expose for the first time the secrets of the BALCO investigation that has turned the sports world upside down. Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional by award-winning investigative journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, is a riveting narrative about the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports, and how baseball’s home run king, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, came to use steroids. Drawing on more than two years of reporting, including interviews with hundreds of people, and exclusive access to secret grand jury testimony, confidential documents, audio recordings, and more, the authors provide, for the first time, a definitive account of the shocking steroids scandal that made headlines across the country. The book traces the career of Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO laboratory, an egomaniacal former rock musician and self-proclaimed nutritionist, who set out to corrupt sports by providing athletes with “designer” steroids that would be undetectable on “state-of-the-art” doping tests. Conte gave the undetectable drugs to 28 of the world’s greatest athletes—Olympians, NFL players and baseball stars, Bonds chief among them. A separate narrative thread details the steroids use of Bonds, an immensely talented, moody player who turned to performance-enhancing drugs after Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals set a new home run record in 1998. Through his personal trainer, Bonds gained access to BALCO drugs. All of the great athletes who visited BALCO benefited tremendously—Bonds broke McGwire’s record—but many had their careers disrupted after federal investigators raided BALCO and indicted Conte. The authors trace the course of the probe, and the baffling decision of federal prosecutors to protect the elite athletes who were involved. Highlights of Game of Shadows include: Barry Bonds A look at how Bonds was driven to use performance-enhancing drugs in part by jealousy over Mark McGwire’s record-breaking 1998 season. It was shortly thereafter that Bonds—who had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health food store—first began using steroids. How Bonds’s weight trainer, steroid dealer Greg Anderson, arranged to meet Victor Conte before the 2001 baseball season with...

Author: Jay Jaffe
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466882182
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, tucked away in upstate New York in a small town called Cooperstown, is far from any major media market or big league stadium. Yet no sports hall of fame’s membership is so hallowed, nor its qualifications so debated, nor its voting process so dissected. Since its founding in 1936, the Hall of Fame’s standards for election have been nebulous, and its selection processes arcane, resulting in confusion among voters, not to mention mistakes in who has been recognized and who has been bypassed. Numerous so-called “greats” have been inducted despite having not been so great, while popular but controversial players such as all-time home run leader Barry Bonds and all-time hits leader Pete Rose are on the outside looking in. Now, in The Cooperstown Casebook, Jay Jaffe shows us how to use his revolutionary ranking system to ensure the right players are recognized. The foundation of Jaffe’s approach is his JAWS system, an acronym for the Jaffe WAR Score, which he developed over a decade ago. Through JAWS, each candidate can be objectively compared on the basis of career and peak value to the players at his position who are already in the Hall of Fame. Because of its utility, JAWS has gained an increasing amount of exposure in recent years. Through his analysis, Jaffe shows why the Hall of Fame still matters and how it can remain relevant in the 21st century.

Author: K.P. Wee
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476615594
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Most baseball fans know Tom Candiotti as a knuckleballer but he began his career as a conventional pitcher in 1983—after becoming just the second player to appear in the major leagues following Tommy John surgery, at a time when only Tommy John himself had ever come back from the operation. Candiotti, whose arm recovered, threw fastballs and curveballs in his first two years in the majors before switching over to the knuckleball for the 1986 season. He would then go on to use primarily the knuckleball for the rest of his career, though he threw a good enough curveball to get hitters out. This biography is based on the recollections of Candiotti himself, his former teammates and managers, newspaper and periodical accounts, and archival resources.

Author: Bud Selig
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006290597X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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A New York Times bestseller Foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin The longtime Commissioner of Major League Baseball provides an unprecedented look inside professional baseball today, focusing on how he helped bring the game into the modern age and revealing his interactions with players, managers, fellow owners, and fans nationwide. More than a century old, the game of baseball is resistant to change—owners, managers, players, and fans all hate it. Yet, now more than ever, baseball needs to evolve—to compete with other professional sports, stay relevant, and remain America’s Pastime it must adapt. Perhaps no one knows this better than Bud Selig who, as the head of MLB for more than twenty years, ushered in some of the most important, and controversial, changes in the game’s history—modernizing a sport that had remained unchanged since the 1960s. In this enlightening and surprising book, Selig goes inside the most difficult decisions and moments of his career, looking at how he worked to balance baseball’s storied history with the pressures of the twenty-first century to ensure its future. Part baseball story, part business saga, and part memoir, For the Good of the Game chronicles Selig’s career, takes fans inside locker rooms and board rooms, and offers an intimate, fascinating account of the frequently messy process involved in transforming an American institution. Featuring an all-star lineup of the biggest names from the last forty years of baseball, Selig recalls the vital games, private moments, and tense conversations he’s shared with Hall of Fame players and managers and the contentious calls he’s made. He also speaks candidly about hot-button issues the steroid scandal that threatened to destroy the game, telling his side of the story in full and for the first time. As he looks back and forward, Selig outlines the stakes for baseball’s continued transformation—and why the changes he helped usher in must only be the beginning. Illustrated with sixteen pages of photographs.

Author: Bill James
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439108374
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Arguing about the merits of players is the baseball fan's second favorite pastime and every year the Hall of Fame elections spark heated controversy. In a book that's sure to thrill--and infuriate--countless fans, Bill James takes a hard look at the Hall, probing its history, its politics and, most of all, its decisions.

Author: Jeff Pearlman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006174705X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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From acclaimed sports writer and bestselling author Jeff Pearlman, a searing and insightful look into the life and career of Barry Bonds, one of the most celebrated, contradictory and controversial sports figures of our time No player in the history of baseball has left such an indelible mark on the game as Barry Bonds. In his twenty-year career, Bonds has amassed an unprecedented 7 Most Valuable Player awards, 8 Gold Gloves, and more than 700 home runs (and counting), an impressive assortment of feats that has earned him the consideration as one of the greatest players the game has ever seen. Equally deserved, however, is his reputation as an insufferable braggart, whose mythical home runs are rivaled only by his legendary ego. From his staggering ability and fabled pedigree (father Bobby played outfield for the Giants; cousin Reggie and godfather Willie are both Hall of Famers), to his well-documented run-ins with teammates and his alleged steroid abuse, Bonds inspires a like amount of passion from both sides of the fence. For many, Bonds belongs beside Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron in baseball’s holy trinity; for others, he embodies all that is wrong with the modern athlete: aloof; arrogant; alienated. Drawing on extensive interviews with Bonds himself, members of his family, former and current managers, teammates, opponents, trainers, outspoken critics, and unapologetic supporters alike, Pearlman reveals, for the first time, a wonderfully nuanced portrait of a prodigiously talented—and immensely flawed—American icon, whose controversial run at baseball immortality forever changed the way we look at our sports heroes.

Author: Jose Canseco
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060746408
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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When Jose Canseco burst into the Major Leagues in the 1980s, he changed the sport -- in more ways than one. No player before him possessed his mixture of speed and power, which allowed him to become the first man in history to belt more than forty home runs and swipe more than forty bases in the same season. He won Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, and a World Series ring. Canseco shattered the mold of the out-of-shape baseball player and ushered in a new era of superathletes who looked like bodybuilders, made outrageous salaries, and enjoyed rock-star lifestyles. And the ticket for this ride? Steroids. Behind the gaudy stats and the glamour of his public life, Canseco cultivated a secret just about everyone in MLB knew about, one that would alter the game of baseball and the way we view our heroes forever. Canseco made himself a guinea pig of the performance-enhancing drugs that were only just beginning to infiltrate the American underground. Anabolic steroids, human growth hormones -- Canseco mixed, matched, and experimented to such a degree that he became known throughout the league as "The Chemist." He passed his knowledge on to trainers and fellow players, and before long, performance-enhancing drugs were running rampant throughout Major League Baseball. Sluggers scooping up pitches at their ankles and blasting them out of the park, pitchers cranking fastballs inning after inning -- Canseco showed the players how to customize their doses to sculpt the bodies they wanted, and baseball as we know it was the result. Today, this issue has crept out of the closet and burst into the headlines as players balloon to herculean proportions and hundred-year-old records are not only broken, but also demolished. In this shocking memoir, Canseco sheds light on a life of dizzying highs and debilitating lows, provides the answers to questions about steroids that millions of fans are only now beginning to ask -- and suggests that, far from being a passing trend, the steroid revolution is only a taste of things to come. Who's juiced? According to Canseco's authoritative account, more than you think. And baseball will never be the same.

Author: Joe Morgan
Publisher: Crown Archetype
ISBN: 0307806286
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Nobody loves baseball more than Joe Morgan. He's proved it with his hall-of-fame performance on the field and his brilliant color commentary in the broadcast booth. Bob Costas says, "There may not be anyone alive who knows more about baseball than Joe Morgan. In his playing days, Morgan was a key cog in the Big Red Machine, and he saw the game at its zenith. From his perch in the broadcast booth he watched as baseball self-destructed, culminating in the devastating strike of 1994. And in 1998, he saw the game come back with baseball's electrifying resurgence in the season of McGwire, Sosa, and the Yankees. But as great as '98 was, Joe knows that baseball still has a lot of problems. And while baseball may be back, Joe wants the fans, the players, and the owners to know that some serious changes still need to be made. In Long Balls, No Strikes, Morgan draws on three decades' experience and passion as he dissects what has gone wrong and right for baseball. Some of his insights may seem unorthodox, some will be controversial, but that's never stopped Joe Morgan before. How do we improve the game on the field? Raise the mound Abolish the designated hitter forever Make the umpires learn the strike zone And that's only the beginning. . . . How do we improve the game off the field? Erase the invisible color line that keeps African-Americans from holding management positions Expand the talent pool by sending more scouts to the inner cities Have all teams share equally from the same profit pool And that's not all. . . . Joe Morgan doesn't believe in "the good old days." Tomorrow's game can be even better than yesterday's. But at the end of the century, the game stands at a crossroads. One path leads right back to the troubles that nearly destroyed the game forever in 1994. The other leads to a new Golden Age. If baseball wants to continue to thrive, some changes must be made. But before there are changes, we need to ask the right questions. And if Joe Morgan doesn't know the answers, then no one does.

Author: Kostya Kennedy
Publisher: Time Home Entertainment
ISBN: 1618939238
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Best-selling author Kostya Kennedy delivers evocative answers in his fascinating reexamination of Pete Rose’s life; from his cocky and charismatic early years through his storied playing career to his bitter war against baseball’s hierarchy to the man we find today—still incorrigible, still adored by many. Where has his improbable saga landed him in the redefined, post-steroid world? Do we feel any differently about Pete Rose today? Should we?