So Bonds won his seventh Most Valuable Player Award this week.
Seven. Damn.
He’s got to be climbing the very pinnacle of the ladder with the greatest players of all time.
His lifetime numbers:
.300/.433/.611
HR: 703
RBI: 1843
SB: 506
Hits: 2730
BB: 2302
I mean…damn.
So where do you all think he’s at?
Is he a greater player than Mays? That DiMaggio?
Is he greater than RUTH?
He’s right up there.
Adjusted OPS (Career)
1. Babe Ruth+ 207
2. Ted Williams+ 190
3. Barry Bonds (39) 184
4. Lou Gehrig+ 179
5. Rogers Hornsby+ 175
6. Mickey Mantle+ 172
7. Dan Brouthers+ 170
Joe Jackson 170
9. Ty Cobb+ 167
10. Jimmie Foxx+ 163
Ruth is still #1 in my book, but if Bonds has a couple more years like '00-'04, he could move up.
I still give Ruth a slight edge overall as the greatest baseball player of all time, only because he was also one of the best pitchers in the AL before becoming a full-time position player. But I think if I have to pick one or the other to stick in my outfied, I’m going to go with Barry. He’s currently third behind Ruth and Williams in Career OPS+, and probably has a chance to move ahead of Williams on that list. I don’t think anyone would dispute that Bonds is better defensively than Williams ever was, and while opinion differs about Ruth’s defense, I strongly suspect Barry’s better; he’s not a center fielder or right fielder, but he does what you need a left fielder to do and generally does it very well. He has a clear edge over most possible contenders in speed (except for Mays, and Bonds has over 150 more steals, though that mainly reflects differences in their eras). I also believe, despite all the talk of the watering down of the talent pool by expansion, that Bonds has done what he’s done against a more consistently high level of pitching than his rivals for the throne (certainly than Ruth). No one besides Barry has so completely changed the mindset of opponents every time he comes to the plate.
I don’t know that I’d want to hang out with the guy (any of his rivals for best of all time except for Williams and, if you include him, Cobb, would be more fun to be around), and I’d hate to be his defense attorney if he were ever accused of a crime, but between the lines Barry’s gotta be real close to knocking Ruth off the pinnacle he’s been on for seventy years. The debate will continue for years no matter what happens, and Ruth will always have his partisans, in no small part because he’s a much more likeable figure. But it’s a two-man race as far as I’m concerned at this point, and a couple more years for Barry like the last few and I’d have to give him the edge.
PP, I swear your reply wasn’t there the last time I previewed. Apparently, great minds do think alike.
what is “OPS”?
I think it’s On Base + Slugging.
I’m not sure winning that many MVPs changes anything, the stats are what they are. I can’t put Bonds ahead of Ruth because Ruth simply changed the sport, top to bottom. He was the first, and he stood head and shoulders above everybody in a way Bonds doesn’t. Nevermind that Ruth can’t be accused of cheating as far as I know.
The game is not the same as when Ruth played. There were no middle relievers, no closers, no specialized pitchers at all. All he had to do was face tired pitchers in the late innings. I would like to see a break down as to what innings Ruth hit most of his homers.
Seeing as no one else has won more than three MVP’s and Bonds has won seven speakes volumns.
Bonds stats…
Ruths stats…
Of course they didn’t have MVP Awards in Ruth’s time like they do today, so that’s kind of a meaningless comparison.
Furthermore, the fact is that voters today are willing to vote for the best player, whereas in the past they were not. Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle really should have won six or seven MVP Awards; Mike Schmidt at least five, Stan Musial at least five. It’s not really logical to give Bonds credit for voters being stupid in 1974.
Having said that, I still would not rank Bonds ahead of Ruth, but I think he’s ahead of Williams. I know the game’s different now, but it will always be different.
OPS is On Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage. It’s generally regarded by the statistically oriented as the best indicator of the actual offensive value of a player, at least among the more easily calculated statistics. It correlates extremely well with more esoteric, and potentially more accurate, measures like Runs Created or Palmer’s Linear Weights measure. OPS+ expresses the relationship between a particular player’s OPS for a given season and the league average for that season as a percentage: a league average player has an OPS+ of 100 – his OPS is 100% of the league average OPS. A player who’s 10% better than the league average has an OPS+ of 110.
The figures for Adjusted OPS+ from http://www.baseball-reference.com, which both Paisley Park and I used, are also Park Adjusted, meaning that they’ve been corrected for the effects of a player’s home park to produce a more neutral result, so that guys who play for the Rockies don’t necessarily look like they’re the second coming of Babe Ruth, even if the raw numbers might suggest it. Adjusted OPS+ is useful for comparing players from different eras and different circumstances, because it measures how much more productive a player is than the average player of the same time, and because it controls for the effect of a particularly friendly (or unfriendly) home park. For a more detailed explanation of this stuff, see Dan Fox’s article Relativity and OPS
The list Paisley Park quoted earlier is the all-time career OPS+ leaders list – the OPS+ for each player is their career OPS+, representing their numbers as a percentage related to the league average OPS for the same years. As the list shows, Ruth is the only player to have a career OPS over 200; Bonds has only a remote shot at 200 even if he has three or four more monster years – he’s moved his career average up from 171 to 184 since 2001, but only by posting four of the best seasons ever by any player. I don’t think there’s any way he passes Ruth on that score.
Bonds’ Adjusted OPS+ for the last four years has been over 230, meaning that his OPS was more than 2.3 times the league average each of those years. In fact, his 2002 (275), 2001 (262), and 2004 (260) seasons are first, second and third respectively all-time. Ruth is fourth at 255 for his 1920 season. Out of the top twenty all-time single-season OPS+ marks, Ruth has eight, Bonds four, Williams two, and Gehrig, Hornsby, Mantle, Ross Barnes, Fred Dunlap, and Pete Browning one each (throw out the 19th century guys and McGwire makes the list, and Williams gets another two seasons to tie him with Bonds at four total in the top twenty). Go down to the top forty all time (minus the 19th century players) and you pick up another two seasons each for Bonds and Ruth, plus two more for Mantle and Hornsby, two for Cobb, and one each for Williams, Gehrig, Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, Willie McCovey, Jimmie Foxx, Nap Lajoie, and Honus Wagner. So out of the top twenty seasons since 1900 by that measure, Ruth has 40% of them, and Bonds and Williams 25% each; out of the top 40 seasons, Ruth has 25%, Bonds 15%, Williams 12.5%, and no one else more than 7.5%.
Which all goes to support my earlier assessment – Bonds is the only guy you can seriously consider as a contender for Ruth’s crown as the greatest of all time, but he’s not yet able to knock it off.
Well, if you’re going to be like THAT… why do you assume that ALL the changes over the past 75 years have made things harder on Bonds?
Would Barry Bonds have put up such astronomical numbers if he’d had to get a “real” job in the off-season, as Ruth’s contemporaries often had to?
Moreover, the MVP award as we know it didn’t exist in Babe Ruth’s day. There was the Chalmers Award, which some people treat as the equivalent. but repeat winners weren’t allowed. I bet the Babe would’ve won several more MVP awards if the current rules had existed in the Twenties.
I think it’s Ruth, then BondsthenWilliams*, then a mile, then everybody else. The thing about Ruth is, he never had years quite like Bonds has had recently, but he had about 20 seasons that were just a little bit below that level. Even with the otherworldly numbers Bonds has been racking up, he still trails Ruth in career OBP and slugging by significant margins.
*That means it’s really close. Bonds has been a complete player in the past, so I gave him the nod. On a more careful reread, what I mean is, exactly what everyone else has said. Damn it.
Ruth will always be regarded as the greatest because of his total dominance of the game in his era. That said, I’ve watched Bonds play the game for the last five years in SF, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who could be more dominant in the game today. Perhaps Ruth can be as good playing against today’s players, but better than Bonds right now, like I said, very tough to imagine. Ruth might be the best of all time, but Bonds is the best I’ve seen (and I go all the way back to Mays, Aaron, Clemente).
Let’s not forget that the MVP is more or less a popularity contest. Case in point: Ted Williams won the Triple Crown twice. In neither of those seasons did he win the MVP Award.
Interestingly, it would appear that the fans and the writers are warming up to Bonds. A case can be made that they had no choice BUT to give it to him, but anyone with any knowledge of baseball history knows that that is not necessarily the case.
Good on him. He’s not better than Ruth, because Ruth was a HoF pitcher before he was a HoF hitter, and Ruth literally set the standard. He could run (early on in his career, anyway), he hit for average (.342 career), and we all know the power of the man. But he’s easily (in my opinion) the second best player ever, supplanting Mays in my estimation.
You know what they should do? Hit him leadoff. He’s unprotected anyway, they won’t pitch to him, so take advantage of that and get him more plate appearances. He could get almost 100 more plate appearances a year by doing that, and since nobody beneath him in the order can drive him in currently, put him at the top and try to make something happen.
Probably wouldn’t make much difference.
The problem with comparing Bonds to Ruth and using the term “best player” is that Bonds, like all the others on this list, is purely a hitter, while Ruth was a superb pitcher as well. You’ve got to separate the hitters from the pitchers in this regard, and for “Best player” of all time, you just have to give the crown to Ruth because he was so good at both.
Beyond that caveat, is there any reason why speed doesn’t seem to count for anything in these rankings? Willie Mays isn’t anywhere in the top ten, even though he had a ton of stolen bases on top of excellent home run/batting average totals. The only ones on that top ten list who have any career speed stats are Bonds and Ty Cobb. But I’ve always thought of Willie Mays as Ted Williams - some average + a lot of speed.
The general approach that I’ve always taken is that there is the “Magic 7” when it comes to outfielders. The group (for the last 30 years at least) has consisted of the following members (in no particular order):
Babe Ruth
Ted Williams
Willie Mays
Hank Aaron
Mickey Mantle
Joe DiMaggio
Ty Cobb
We can argue about till the cows come home about the ordering of these seven, but these players will usually occupy the top seven spots of most baseball fans list of the best outfielders of all time.
I believe Bonds has earned a place among the “Magic 8.” Easily.
(As an aside: I always maintained that it is more or less impossible [and probably futile] to compare players from different eras in any meaningful way because of differences in the way the game is played. I don’t think you can meaningfully compare Cy Young to Roger Clemens, for example. You can certainly say that they were both among the best [if not the best] pitchers of their days, but you can’t really say that one was better than the other. You can’t say Young was better because he won 100+ more games, nor can you say that Clemens is better because he garnered more strikeouts [Ks being much more common today than they were in Young’s day]. The same applies, IMHO [although not as drastically], to outfielders. I don’t think you can meaningfully compare Bonds to Ruth because of the way the game has changed. Nobody, for example, is going to hit .342 lifetime while hitting 700+ home runs. The game has changed too much since Ruth’s day. No one is going to hit .367 lifetime - period. So while you can certainly say that Bonds is among the greatest [or is the greatest] of his day, I think that making statements that he [or even Ruth] is the greatest of all time is somewhat misleading, if not meaningless.)
Zev Steinhardt
Zev Steinhardt
The baseball writers continue to stick their collective heads in the sand and ignore
the steroid controversy.
Until it is resolved I would never vote for Bonds.
If it is proven he took them (this would not surprise me) then everyone who voted for him becomes a king-sized asshole.
Well, I think the current conversation is based on the premise of “If everything he did is legal…” Obviously, if we find he was using illegal steriods, aluminum bats 
, etc. then all bets are off.
Zev Steinhardt
There’s a practical reason and a philosophical reason. The main practical reason is, to put it bluntly, that speed doesn’t count for much in the particular stats we’ve been discussing. Other than whatever component of Slugging Percentage is due to doubles and triples that would otherwise be singles or doubles, it’s completely ignored. Most sabremetricians don’t consider that a significant flaw, since it’s been established to the satisfaction of most of them that (a) steals are overrated, and contribute far less to a player’s team’s success than is commonly supposed, (b) whatever a player’s speed may contribute in terms of extra bases taken on hits by other players is insignificant in the grand scheme of things and is lost in the noise because there’s no effective metric for it, and (c) these are measures of offensive production, so they ignore any effect a player’s speed may have in the field.
In developing the Linear Weights formula back in The Hidden Game of Baseball, Pete Palmer carefully and mathematically established the “run value” of each of the various possible outcomes of a plate appearance and of events like stolen bases, caught stealing, etc. In the original formula, a stolen base is worth .3 runs, while a caught stealing is worth -.6 runs (that’s negative .6). By comparison, the run value of a single is worth .46 runs, a double .8 runs, a triple 1.02 runs, a home run 1.4 runs, a walk .33 runs, etc. (The actual weightings have changed over time and vary somewhat depending on the overall performance of the league each year, but the variation is fairly small). Essentially, a player has to be successful in steal attempts at least 66% of the time in order not to have a negative effect on his team’s chances of winning. The percentages change a bit in different runner-on-base/number-of-outs scenarios, but that’s the average. So it takes nearly 5 successful steals, with no caught stealings, to equal the offensive impact of a HR. And given that one of the other discoveries of sabremetrics is that it takes somewhere between 10 and 11 additional runs scored by a team to produce one additional win, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that it takes 33 steals without being caught to produce an extra win, whereas it takes fewer than 8 HR to have the same effect. And there’s no “anti-home-run” that results in a -2.8 run impact for your team.
There’s no question that speed has intangible positive effects for the team that possesses it – we saw pitchers rattled by the presence of a fast runner on first in tight situations a couple of times in this year’s playoffs. And without speed, Betran, Edmonds, Bonds, and others don’t necessarily get to every ball in the outfield they reach now. Unfortunately, no one’s come up with a good way to measure those things quantitatively. It’s one reason that I rate Bonds (and Mays) higher than some folks who go purely by the numbers, but I have to agree that it’s not enough by itself to swing an argument one way or another. As one more piece of evidence among many however, it’s valid.