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

With the process still tainted by the steroid era, David Ortiz was the lone player to gain induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, while players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were shut out.

«Big Papi» was the only player to clear the 75 percent threshold for induction, according to results of this year's voting by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. Ortiz was named on 307 ballots (77.9 percent) in his first year of eligibility.

«I am truly honored and blessed by my selection to the Hall of Fame — the highest honor that any baseball player can reach in their lifetime,» Ortiz said in a statement released by the Boston Red Sox. «I am grateful to the baseball writers who considered my career in its totality, not just on the statistics.»

Bonds, baseball's all-time home run leader (66 percent), 354-game winner Roger Clemens (65.2 percent), 600-homer-club member Sammy Sosa (18.5 percent) and longtime ace pitcher Curt Schilling (58.6 percent) were in their 10th and final year of eligibility in the annual BBWAA balloting.

Bonds, Sosa and Clemens have gone from posters on fans walls to the poster boys for the performance-enhancing drug era. From court dramas to testimony in front of Congress, their PED histories have been well documented. Based on their baseball contributions, they are sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famers, but voters prefer that they remain in the PED shadows.

Ortiz is a different story, despite his own PED suspicions. A 2009 New York Times story reported that Ortiz was among 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing substances during a round of tests conducted in 2003. Those results were supposed to remain confidential and were done to see if the league had reached a