Mike Celizic

I’m not going to defend Barry Bonds as a person, because I’ve never found him to be agreeable or concerned with anyone other than himself. Nor am I going to say he never took a performance-enhancing drug, because we all know he did — he admitted as much in that leaked grand jury testimony.

In short, I don’t have a great deal of respect for him.

But five years after he retires and the Hall of Fame ballot arrives in the mail with his name listed among the candidates, I’m voting for him, just as I voted for Mark McGwire. And it will be a lot easier to vote for Bonds.

I’m pretty sure a substantial number of my colleagues in the Baseball Writers Association of America won’t agree with me. They stayed away from McGwire’s name in this year’s election as if it were radioactive.

They’ll probably do the same with Bonds, at least in his first year of eligibility.

Baseball writers do that, and it’s a legitimate way to register moral outrage at a player’s conduct. But, while I’m not at all sure that McGwire will ever get in, I have little question that Bonds ultimately will take up residence where he belongs — among the game’s immortals.

The reasoning is straightforward. McGwire’s credentials are locked up in breaking Roger Maris’ single-season home run record and his 583 career homers. But if a voter wants to object on the grounds that he was probably juiced when he was putting up his biggest numbers — homer totals of 52, 58, 70 and 65 from 1996-99 — the rest of his numbers don’t come close to qualifying. Before he went on that tear, his highest total ever had been 49 home runs in his rookie season, 1987. After that, he exceeded 40 only once before his power explosion, which coincided with him growing muscles in places where, for most, muscles don’t even exist.

So if you knock him down to 40 homers a season during those surge years — call that the ’roid factor — he loses 85 homers and retires two shy of 500, which isn’t the grand total it used to be to start with. Mix in his .263 lifetime batting average, barely 1,400 RBIs (1,600 is the unofficial cutoff for automatic entry in the Hall), and just 1,626 hits, and he’s not a Hall of Famer.

I still think he is, only because baseball never objected to what he was doing, so who am I to decide what the rules of the game should be? I can only judge by what they were and are, and when McGwire was resurrecting the league’s popularity, he didn’t break the rules; baseball did not ban steroids, did not test for them, refused to believe they even existed.

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But you can’t play that game with Bonds. He’s going to retire with at least 760 home runs. If he decides to play another year as a DH, he’ll have more than 3,000 hits. Another 20 RBIs will give him 2,000, and his 2,540 walks are the most ever. He’s also got more than 2,200 runs and a lifetime batting average of .298 and an on-base percentage of .444.

Go ahead, strip him of 150 home runs — an exorbitant total — for steroids use. He’s still got 600. And forget the home runs, look at the hits, the batting average, the RBIs, the on-base percentage. Use any ’roid factor you want, he’s still got enormous totals.

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