This stat blows my mind. For Bonds, in his late thirties, to come out and put up these kinds of numbers is amazing. It wouldn’t surprise me if he continues to put up monster numbers in '05 & '06. The Top 5 best offensive seasons ever could be all Bonds!
And great explanation about OPS (and speed) rackensack. If I didn’t know any better, I would say Bill James is in the house!
Are you a member of the press with a ballot for the MLB annual awards? Then you would never be voting for him anyway.
And do you seriously mean that any voter who acknowledged that Bonds was the most outstanding player in the National League this year and who voted for him on that basis, given that there’s no firm evidence of steroid use on Bonds’ part at this point, retroactively becomes a “king-sized asshole” should the allegations later prove to be true? So if you do an outstanding job at work, markedly better than anyone else in your position, and as your manager I promote you in recognition of that, and it turns out later that you took some shortcuts that may or may not have allowed you to achieve the results you did, I ex post facto become an asshole for acting on the evidence in front of me, not the evidence I uncover months or years later? Interesting. Hardly rational, but interesting.
And if it’s never proven (this would not surprise me), but they didn’t vote for him, they’re king-sized assholes.
We had a thread recently in which we discussed the fact that Aaron had a similar, though not as dramatic, burst in productivity in his late 30s as well, as he closed in on Ruth’s record. His HR/AB went up significantly, and his ratio of BB to Ks went up significantly as well – who’s that sound like?
Hardly. He gets paid to do this sort of thing, and he actually thought up a lot of this stuff in the first place. I just go look it up in the relevant places and plop it down here because I find it interesting.
Yep. We seam-heads just stand on the shoulders of giants.
With respect to the issue of speed, I think it should be pointed out that most everybody gives Mays, and to a lesser extent DiMaggio and Mantle, credit for defensive excellence. That’s in part due to their speed. Speed is a major factor in an outfielder’s defense, less so at other positions.
None of the other candidates for Best Player of All Time were as good a defensive player as Willie Mays, but there does seem to be a big range of speed value:
Willie Mays - Very fast
Honus Wagner - Very fast
Mickey Mantle - Very fast for some of his career, average for the rest
Ty Cobb - Very fast
Barry Bonds - Fast
Joe DiMaggio - Above average, although in his day you didn’t try to steal bases
Hank Aaron - Average, but a smart baserunner
Babe Ruth- Average, reckless baserunner
Ted Williams - Slow
The question is what difference it makes. Speed on defense is already being considered; nobody compares Mays to Ruth and Williams without acknowledging the monster difference in fielding value. But how much does baserunning speed matter?
I would guess about 10 runs a year, max. The best basestealer in the lot is probably Barry Bonds; Cobb stole more, but Cobb also got thrown out probably 350 times or more (they didn’t count CS for a lot of his career.) Bonds has stolen 506 bases and been thrown out 141 times, a very good ratio. Going by Pete Palmer’s method - which isn’t great but for this purpose it works okay - that’s worth about 75 runs. Or, over the course of Bonds’s career, like 4 runs a season more than someone like Williams who pretty much didn’t run at all.
Now, Bonds’s speed helps in other ways. For instance, Bonds has grounded into only 141 double plays. Williams grounded in 197, in fewer games than Bonds. That’s worth 20-30 runs. But we’re only up to 5 a season. Even adding on a few more runs for extra bases on hits, 10 is the most you’re gonna get.
Over the course of a career 10 runs a season adds up, but that’s the difference between the BEST basestealer here, Bonds (I imagine Cobb, Wagner and Mays would have similar advantages) and the very slowest, Williams. The difference between those men and an average baserunner like Hank Aaron is more like 4 or 5 runs.
I’m not so sure about that. How many of his stolen bases were due to fielders not wanting his spikes in their shin?
Cobb has earned a reputation as being very aggressive, and he was, but all players in his day were like that. Baseball in Ty Cobb’s day was an exceptionally tough, violent sport, with very few gentlemen. Fights were commonplace - even fights between players and umpires would take place - and would often continue outside the stadium. Cobb’s aggression is remembered because he was also the premier star of his time and because he was just unlikable and paranoid and ended up with no friends, but everyone else would spike each other and throw punches and knock your teeth out with tags. Hundreds of Cobb’s contemporaries were just as aggressive and mean, but none stole 892 bases.