Report: Barry Bonds to file case accusing MLB teams of collusion
Now that Barry Bonds has cleared his name from any criminal charges, he’s coming after the people he has long believed to have worked together to end his baseball career prematurely.
According to a report from Jon Heyman of CBS Sports, Bonds is preparing to file a grievance against Major League Baseball, accusing teams of colluding to keep him out of the league following the 2007 season when he became a free agent. Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record that season and finished with 762 for his career but did so under heavy suspicion of PED use, making him a very unpopular figure around baseball.
At 43 years old, he played 126 games in 2007 and hit 28 home runs with a .480 OBP and 1.085 OPS. Despite those strong offensive numbers, Bonds and his agent Jeff Boris have said they didn’t receive a single contract offer for the 2008 season even though they claimed Bonds would play for the league’s minimum salary.
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Bonds’ age and certainly his reputation as a difficult person to deal with didn’t help his cause, but there’s no denying he would have helped a team on the field if he could have come close to replicating his stats from the season before.
Sports Illustrated legal analyst Michael McCann examined Bonds’ case back in 2009, looking at the arguments for both sides while Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra writes that MLB will be ready for the challenge:
But he-said, he-said will not win the day for Barry Bonds. He’s going to need evidence. Testimony from people within the game who were party to or aware of actual acts which form the basis of collusion. Memos and emails would help, but seven or eight years is ample time for evidence to disappear. And that’s before you realize that MLB front offices were a lot smarter about just about everything by 2007 than they were back in the 1980s. Both in terms of not creating evidence trails and in terms of not giving out bad contracts to aging players. Put simply: the defendants in this case will not be pushovers.
All these years later, Bonds, with help from the MLBPA, is set to take one last big swing at MLB. It’ll be compelling to see what comes of it.
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Israel Fehr is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter. Follow @israelfehr
