After I wrote my little piece on Bonds yesterday my brother Keith calls me up and asks do I really think Bonds is the greatest player of all time? Better than Ruth and Cobb and Musial and Mays and Aaron and A-Rod. And the answer is still a resounding yes. Though we didn’t have time to have a full discussion about why, one of the initial arguments my brother happened to bring up was that of Bonds batting average and where it ranks. Well as I said to him comparing eras in baseball becomes more and more difficult by the day.
The problem with comparing the different eras is all of them have inherent advantages and disadvantages. I will still argue until the day that I die that leaving Black and Hispanics out of baseball for the first 70 years of the history of the game is a way more egregious act than using steroids. Now I have gone back and forth about this with many people and the argument always comes back to this, taking steroids was a committed act and leaving Blacks and Hispanics out was an omitted act. Well I don’t necessarily agree with that, it was agreed upon by major league owners at the time that nobody would sign a Negro player, that sounds pretty deliberate to me. Now I know that the deliberate part of the act was by the owners not specifically the players, but it was still a direct act to keep a segment of the population out of the game. Plus I know how good Blacks and Hispanics have proven to be over the course of baseball history, nobody has still been able to show who took performance enhancing drugs, when they took them, and how much do they indeed help. Now I am not burying my head in the sand saying I don’t think people did them, but until someone can truly come up with a quantifiable analysis that tells me how much a certain type of steroid can help, I can’t really worry about it when comparing players.
What is my point in all of this? Well that the best way you can compare eras is looking at how people fared against their contemporaries, and in the end the cream of each generation will rise to the top.
So now we get back to what my brother was asking about, Bonds average. But my immediate comeback before I even looked it up to see where he stands amongst the collective group, I stated that in the post World War II era (the colorization of baseball) the batting averages on a whole are way down. Done are the days of a group of players hitting .330+ for a lifetime. I went back and checked it out, and indeed I am pretty smart. It took post WWII players and saw where Bonds ranked. He ranks 227th overall, but post WWII he ranks 61st. Now you might say, hey fat man, that isn’t that good, and yes it is true that Rusty Greer has a higher lifetime average, but let’s take a look inside the numbers. Ted Williams leads this generation of baseball with a .344 average, if you go down 20 points to .324 you find Joe Dimaggio ranking 9th on the list. So in a 20 point span there are only 9 players. Now take the #10 hitters, Kirby Puckett and Derek Jeter at .317 and go down only 19 points to Barry Bonds at .298 and you have 50 players in that group. So yes, while he is 61st overall he is only 19 points away from being in the top 10, in which there are a group of 50 or so players between him and the top 10.
Now this is about to be a statistician’s wet dream coming at you, so put on your thinking caps. I am going to tell you how many times Bonds finished in the Top 10 in a myriad of offensive categories, which will help prove my point. Also in the first set of parentheses I will put the first year he finished in the Top 10 in that category and the last year, so you can also see that he has accomplished these feats throughout his entire career. And lastly in the second set of parentheses you will see a number which represents how many times he finished in the top 10 of that category during “non-roid” years. According to Game of Shadows (the Holy Bible of Bonds life) the roid years are 1999-2003.
13 times Bonds has finished in the Top in the voting for NL MVP, winning 7 of them. (1990, 2004) (9)
6 times he has finished in the Top 10 in batting average, winning 2 batting titles. (1992, 2004) (3)
16 times he has finished in the Top 10 in slugging percentage, leading the league 7 times. (1988, 2007) (12)
17 times he has finished in the Top 10 in runs scored, once leading the league. (1987, 2004) (13)
17 times he has finished in the Top 10 in On Base percentage, leading the league 10 times (1988, 2007) (13)
12 times he has finished in the Top 10 in Total bases, leading the league once. (1988, 2002) (9)
5 times he has finished in the Top 10 in doubles, never leading the league. (1989, 1998) (5)
3 times he has finished in the Top 10 in triples, never leading the league. (1987, 1998) (3)
15 times he has finished in the Top 10 in the league in Homeruns, leading the league twice. (1988, 2007) (11)
10 times he has finished in the Top 10 in RBI, leading the league once. (1990, 2002) (8)
9 times he has finished in the Top 10 in stolen bases, never leading the league (1986, 1998) (9)
18 times he has finished in the Top 10 in At bats per HR, leading the league 8 times. (1988, 2007) (13)
Think about this, Bonds is 32nd on the all time steals list. If you add up the homerun totals from the number 2 guy on that list, Lou Brock, to the number 10 guy, Honus Wagner, they are still 7 homeruns short of Bonds. Of the base stealers ahead of Barry Bonds only 9 of them even have triple digit homeruns, and the closest to him is Ricky Henderson at 297. Only 6 of the 500 HR club guys have even stolen 200 bases and, Barry has 514.
And now to end it all with the peace de resistance, the greatest random stat Tim Kurkjian ever came up with, in 2004 Barry Bonds set the record for walks in a season with 232, that is 29 more than the 203 that Shawon Dunston had in his 18 year career.
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4 comments:
riddle me this, if it was 1995 both were free agents and you were the gm of a large market team where money was not an option, would you pick sign bonds or junior griffey. i guess my point is that absent junior's injuries and bonds' miraculous late-30s production, i think i might have taken junior. maybe not, but its a conversation. i also dont know that bonds is better than mays was, considering he hit 660 in an era of huge ballparks and played cf, a more difficult position, as well as bonds played lf.
you can ignore the performance enhancers if you want b/c it is clearly unquantifiable but the problem is how do you truly compare bonds' last 6 years with the rest of history
I'm not qualified to say who the greatest baseball player of all time is. The Great Keith DeBlasio does bring up an interesting point about batting average though.
In my humble opinion, no one talks about the effect of steroids on batting average. Everyone says "you still have to be able to hit the ball," which overlooks the fact that added power gives you more hits.
Look at Brett Boone's numbers. Once he starting hitting HR, he went from a .250 hitter to a .331
hitter. Many of his warning-track fly-outs turned into HR, which increased his average by turing outs into hits.
Brady Anderson hit .297 in 1996 when he hit 50 HR, more than 40 points above his career average. Sosa's power surge also increased his average. Luis Gonzalez was a decent hitter, but his highest average came at age 33 when he magically hit 57 HR. The same is true with Bonds.
The outlier is Jason Giambi - he still hits HR but his average has crapped the bed. Happily, this is the exception that proves the rule.
My point is that everyone (well not eeryone, but clearly a large majority) was using some type of performance enhancement substance. Now again, that does not make it right, but it puts things on a level playing field, he had no more an advantage over his competitors.
And as for your question Josh, who would I choose, then and now I would still have picked Bonds. He has always been a more complete player. He has a better arm, gets on base more, hits Homruns at the same rate, is a much better baserunner, slugs higher, scores runs at a bigger clip.
To add on: almost no one ever talks about the impact of amphetamines, the "greenies" that were much more prevalent in the game for a much longer period of time than steroids and HGH and the like.
That stuff goes way back, remember Jim Bouton's "Ball Four"? That was written in the early 1970s. And you could make a good argument that amphetamines are as much a "performance enhancer" as anything else.
Not to mention the late 70s through mid 80s cocaine eras. Should we get the 86 Mets to give back the World Series?
Everyone who moralizes about this "performance enhancement" issue tends to be selective in what offends them. It is tiresome.
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