After getting a hair more than a third of the vote a year ago, and with 36.8% on Tuesday, Barry Bonds is slowly inching toward the magic number to get him enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
And his biggest supporter…might just be his son Nikolai.
“I believe my father will be in the Hall of Fame. He should’ve been a first ballot Hall of Famer, but it’s in the hands of people who are very opinionated,” the 25-year-old said back in October. “People like Ty Cobb are in the Hall. When they want to say integrity is a factor, [this] means they are all hypocrites anyway, so they can have their opinion. My father helps more people than most, he played the game his very best and he accomplished feats that people said were impossible. Whether they vote him in or not he’s a Hall of Famer to the people that mean most to him and I believe that’s all that matters at the end of the day.”
2015 marks Barry Bonds’ third year on the ballot and it’s hard to find a Hall of Fame discussion that doesn’t link the former slugger to performance enhancing drugs. And for Nikolai, it’s tough seeing how his dad has been treated since he last took his cuts for the San Francisco Giants.
“The hardest part for me is when you really think about it…his job was to entertain. And he did a damn good job entertaining not only the city of San Francisco, but baseball fans across the world,” Nikolai continues. “To see a man get crucified for entertaining people made and still makes no sense to me. They literally treated him like he was a convict. It was just sad to watch a man who put his mind, body, and soul into something just get treated the way he did.”
But in the end, it just brought the two together.
“I will always be his biggest fan and number one supporter. That will never change,” Nikolai added. “I’ve always got my dad’s back and he knows that.”
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