(Reuters) – Major League Baseball home run king Barry Bonds was fired from his role as hitting coach of the Miami Marlins after failing to kickstart the team’s offense during his one season in charge, the Miami Herald reported on Monday. Bonds, a seven-times National League Most Valuable Player whose suspicion of doping has kept him out of the Hall of Fame, was released after the Marlins offense finished near the bottom of the league, the report said. Under Bonds, who leads the all-time home run list with 762 and hit an MLB-record 73 homers in 2001, the Marlins scored the fourth fewest runs of 30 teams, only two spots higher than the prior campaign. According to the report, Marlins manager Don Mattingly had often lamented the team’s failure to score late in games and also recently indicated the hitters were not doing enough in the way of pre-game preparation and utilizing technology. Miami missed the postseason for a 13th consecutive year and were 27th in the league with 665 runs, up from 613 in 2015. They played most of the second half of the 2016 season without injured slugger Giancarlo Stanton. (Reporting by Frank Pingue in Toronto. Editing by Steve Keating.)
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