Barry Bonds documentary in the works at HBO

HBO has started production on a documentary about Barry Bonds, perhaps the best baseball player to not get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The premium cable channel announced that the film will chronicle his career, utilizing archival footage and interviews with his peers and confidants. Notably, HBO said that while Bonds himself has yet to formally participate, the network is keeping the door open for the former slugger to do so.

In a press release sent on Wednesday, the network said:

HBO and Words + Pictures are currently in production on a documentary chronicling Barry Bonds, one of the greatest talents in the history of baseball, and one of the most compelling and polarizing figures in all of sports. Keith McQuirter, (“By Whatever Means Necessary: The Times of Godfather of Harlem”) who spent his childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, is directing the film with Academy Award®-winner Ezra Edelman (“O.J.: Made in America”) serving as an executive producer alongside Connor Schell and Libby Geist, creators of the Emmy® Award-winning series, “30 for 30” and executive producers of “The Last Dance.” The filmmakers will include a diverse cast of influential figures from Barry Bonds' life and career, and the opportunity for Bonds to actively participate and share his firsthand experiences remains available.

While most attention in the sports documentary space has been focused on "Drive to Survive" and "The Last Chance" clones from different sports bodies, there has always been an excitement for projects from HBO Sports. The Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning media platform has drawn widespread acclaim for projects on various sports, with notable baseball fare such as its feature film "61*" on the Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris home run chase of 1961 and the 9/11 reflective documentary "Nine Innings from Ground Zero: The 2001 World Series."

The public hasn't heard much from Bonds, baseball's career home run king, after he hung up his spikes in 2007. While he has taken to social media about his post-career exploits, he has not clamored to speak very much in public since being let go as the Miami Marlins hitting coach in 2016. Bonds regretted his contentious relationship with the media, as he talked about in this Sports on Earth interview during his lone season in Miami.

Although the network has said that Bonds has yet to actively participate in this new project, it did secure his participation in its last baseball documentary. The cabler produced "Say Hey, Willie Mays" on Bonds' godfather and arguably the sport's greatest living baseball player, Willie Mays. One can deduce that HBO's push for a Bonds documentary began with his willingness to speak about Mays.

In an interview with Decider prior to its November release, director Nelson George talked about how HBO was able to get Bonds to agree to come on camera:

So it took HBO and the UNINTERRUPTED team a lot of conversations with him and his team about what we’re going to talk about what our intentions were. He was very concerned about if this was going to be a ‘gotcha’ interview.

We finally got him, and he was the last one to do the doc. And his level of emotion, his level of love was really amazing. We had basically interviewed him for 90 minutes to two hours and had most of our major questions answered. He went on for another half hour just talking baseball.

Bonds might be the most controversial figure in American sports history, not just in the history of baseball. The seven-time National League MVP had long been linked to using performance-enhancing drugs, and despite amassing Hall of Fame numbers before the rumored use, he has yet to be voted into the prestigious club.

Bonds fell short of of the Hall of Fame in each of his 10 years on the ballot, although his vote count had nearly doubled from 36.2 percent in 2013 to 66 percent in 2022. Bonds remains eligible through the Hall's veterans' committee, which will vote again later this year.