Former Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz lone inductee into Baseball Hall of Fame as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens miss again

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The Baseball Hall of Fame process this year was still tainting by the steroid era, and David Ortiz was the only player elected to the shrine.

The results of this year's voting by the Baseball Writers Association of America show that Big Papi was the only player to clear 75%. The 58th player elected in his first year of eligibility was the one who finished with 77.9%. He will be the youngest member of the Hall at 46 years old.

I learned a long time ago how difficult it is to get in on the first ballot. It is something that is very special to me.

The BBWAA balloting for the final year of eligibility for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, and Curt Schilling was held on Tuesday.

Bonds, Sosa and Clemens were first-ballot Hall of Famers, but their numbers became synonymous with the era of performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds and Clemens have long denied using performance enhancing drugs, but the accusations have persisted in the media and in books, and have been the subject of testimony in front of Congress. In the end, a third of the voters decided that the allegations were too egregious to overlook, so that they would not be allowed into the hall of fame.

Despite his own suspicions, Ortiz is a different person. A story in The New York Times reported in 2009, that there were 104 players who tested positive for performance- enhancing substances in a 2003 round of tests. The tests were done to see if the league had reached a threshold to conduct regular testing, and the results were supposed to remain confidential.

In 2016 commissioner Rob Manfred said the tests in question were not conclusive because it was difficult to distinguish between legal and banned substances.

During subsequent testing, Ortiz has never been a positive at any point.

When asked about those suspicions Tuesday, Ortiz said, "We had someone coming out with this one list, where you don't know what anybody tested positive for." People are pointing fingers at me. We started being tested for drugs and I never tested positive. What does that tell you?

The cases of Bonds and Clemens were more divisive than Sosa's, but his support never reached the threshold for election. Both climbed over the 50% mark in the same year, only to see their support fall off in recent seasons. Their last go-arounds were for Bonds and Clemens.

In a statement, he said that he and his family put the Hall of Fame in the back of their minds 10 years ago. I did not play baseball to get into the Hall of Fame. I played to make a difference in my family's lives. Give back to my community and fans as well as focus on winning titles. It was my passion. I gave everything I had for my family and for the fans who supported me.

If it was up to the three of them, they would join him on the stage in New York this summer.