SAN FRANCISCO - The wait will continue for the all-time home run king.
Barry Bonds was not one of four players selected for the Hall of Fame on Wednesday, once again falling short of being on 75 percent of BBWAA ballots. In his sixth year on the ballot, Bonds received 56.4 percent of the vote.
The 2018 Hall of Fame class will consist of Chipper Jones, Vladimir Guerrero, Jim Thome and Trevor Hoffman.
By any statistical measure, Bonds - a seven-time MVP who hit 762 home runs, should have been in the Hall of Fame years ago. But like Roger Clemens and others, Bonds has been held back by the steroid cloud. He received just 36.2 percent of the vote in 2013, his first year on the ballot, and didn't make significant strides until last year, when he jumped to 53.8 percent.
The electorate has changed over the years, with younger writers taking a different approach to the steroid era and more rigid retired writers being purged, but Bonds still has a ways to go with just four years left on the ballot.
Bonds has mostly shied away from discussing the Hall of Fame in recent years, and when he joined the Giants as a special advisor last year, he said his answers had not changed since previous statements.
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"To keep talking about it doesn't do any good," he said.
Privately, however, Bonds has shown how much the honor means to him. When the Giants celebrated Willie McCovey's 80th birthday at a private event at the Gotham Club earlier this month, Bonds gave an emotional speech during which he told McCovey and Willie Mays that he hoped to get in while two of his childhood heroes were still around to witness it. Mays turns 87 in May.
Former Giants Jeff Kent and Omar Vizquel were also on the ballot, and while neither came anywhere close to induction, both received enough support to stay on the ballot in 2019.
Here are the complete results from the BBWAA:
