MLB: Can Bonds make it to 756?

[Chastain86]

Mark my words:

The guy will finish out his contract with the Giants, and then sign with the Yankees as their DH and finish out his career.

It would be incredibly smart of him to do so, even though saying that out loud causes my eye to twitch involuntarily with anger.

[Jonathan_Chance]

Thanks, Rick!

And I bet Bonds DOES stay put. His latest comments about the world in general sure don’t show him as trying to sharpen his public image:

“I ain’t never played baseball for fame. I just play to play. I ain’t never liked fame. I don’t need that [expletive]. I don’t need fame. Fame is taking care of your bills, your kids, and your household and having respect, that’s about all. That’s famous to me.”
–Bonds

“I wasn’t getting any of that stuff when I had six MVPs, five MVPs, four MVPs, three MVPs. Why would it be any different now?”
–Bonds, on his lack of product endorsements

“Sure, we make a lot of money. So? That’s the only thing I do. If I could do something else better, I already would have done that. This was my skill.”
–Bonds

So, still supremely talented. But still disparaging of the rest of the baseball world (most especially including the media).

[RickJay]

Bonds reminds me of what Dick Allen could have been if Allen hadn’t also been lazy and probably mildly schizophrenic.

There seems to be two ways of looking at Bonds; one, the Rick Reilly Theory, popular with the media and a lot of opposing fans, is that Bonds is an evil, no-good son of a bitch who chokes in the clutch and deserves to be shot at dawn. The other, which is popular at Baseball Prospectus and among people who just like being contrary, is that Bonds is misunderstood and the media is out to get him.

I think it obvious that Bonds is, in fact, a pretty colossal dink. It’s fine to not like speaking to the media or to be disinterested in the trappings of fame, but it’s possible to be those things without being a jackass.

On the other hand I think it quite clear that Bonds’s problem IS relating to the media and the public - not in the way he approaches his job. He’s obviously a ballaplayer who has put great care and effort into playing baseball as well as he can. I am reminded of the infamous Rick Reilly column in which Reilly castigates Bonds for having his own trainer and his own nutritionist. I was flabbergasted that Reillay would try to make this look like a fault. It struck me as being an example for others to follow; shouldn’t ALL elite, highly paid athletes hire their own trainers and nutritionists? At $15 million a year he can certainly afford it. Why is that a BAD thing? Bonds was investing his own money into keeping himself in shape.

So Bonds, to my eyes, is a supremely dedicated and gifted ballplayer who, regrettably, is also an irritable jerk. IMHO, the latter point doesn’t matter much to me, because I don’t have to deal with the guy. It apparently doesn’t make a difference in his team’s fortunes, since Bonds’s teams have always done well. That distinguishes Bonds from a Dick Allen, who was a jerk and who also let it affect his game, shorten his career, and pull his team apart before a big playoff series. So I admire the guy, because he does what he’s supposed to do as well as anyone I’ve ever seen.

[zamboniracer]

@RickJay

Nobody’s suggesting that Bonds and Morgan don’t affect the number of K’s, BB’s, and homers. However, in the case of K’s, BB’s and homers, those things are heavily affected by who the pitcher AND the hitter are. In the case of hits, it appears to be affected very little by who the pitcher is (once the ball is put into play; pitchers with more strikeouts, obviously, allow fewer hits.)

You’re welcome to doubt the thesis but thus far, all studies into it find the same thing. Do you have objective evidence to the contrary?
Which has a pretty strong impact on home runs allowed - which, again, is one of the three things we agree the pitcher exerts great control over. Actually, my understanding is that a pitcher can exert a slight amount of control over hits allowed, but it’s not much.
With all due respect to Mr. Perry, who was a great pitcher, if he could pitch THAT precisely, I am curious as to how he came to allow 399 home runs, 1,379 walks and 4,938 hits. If he could place the ball that effectively why’d he get lit up all those times?

I’m sure Gaylord knows a lot about pitching, but he still managed to give up 4,938 hits on (by my calculations) approximately 12,400 at bats. So when the ball was put into play against Perry, about 39.8% of them fell in for hits. That’s basically league average for the time and places he pitched - actually, maybe a hair below, certainly no more than four or five hits a year. That’s the point. The skills in this area really amounts to no more than a hit a month in the case of really GOOD pitchers. It’s a tiny, almost unmeasurable and basically meaningless skill. But a pitcher’s ability to avoid walks and strike guys out is a very big deal, and varies enormously from pitcher to pitcher. Home runs less so, but more important than hits.

Rick, no offense, but your calculations about Perry sure doesn’t look accurate. Do you really mean to say that opposing batters hit .398 (Hits divided by ABs, as per your figures) against him, and that that was the league average? I’m betting the major league batting average for the 1960s-1980s was a lot closer to .265 than it ever was to .398.

Also, you asked for an objective cite. If this was a trial and I called Gaylord Perry as a witness, I’m also betting that he’d qualify as an expert witness with regard to pitching.

[RickJay]

@zamboniracer

Rick, no offense, but your calculations about Perry sure doesn’t look accurate. Do you really mean to say that opposing batters hit .398 (Hits divided by ABs, as per your figures) against him, and that that was the league average? I’m betting the major league batting average for the 1960s-1980s was a lot closer to .265 than it ever was to .398.

Also, you asked for an objective cite. If this was a trial and I called Gaylord Perry as a witness, I’m also betting that he’d qualify as an expert witness with regard to pitching.

No, batters hit .398 against him when they put the ball into play. (I wasn’t clear, but the 12,400 at bats don’t include his strikeouts.) Overall, they hit more like .240, which was well below the league average. The difference between Perry and an average pitcher was not his ability to control balls put into play, but his ability to strike men out (for most of his career, anyway) and not walk batters. That’s what set him apart from your average schmoe.

If Perry was skilled at preventing hits ASIDE from getting more strikeouts and giving up fewer walks and homers, he would expect that his batting average allowed on everything except strikeouts and homers would be better than average. But it wasn’t much better at all - like I said, maybe a hit or two a month. It’s dwarfed by the REALLY important things: his strikeouts, his excellent control, and the fact that he gave up slightly fewer homers than would be normal. That’s McCracken’s hypothesis.

[Jonathan_Chance]

@zamboniracer

Also, you asked for an objective cite. If this was a trial and I called Gaylord Perry as a witness, I’m also betting that he’d qualify as an expert witness with regard to pitching.

I don’t want to be inflammatory here, nor do I wish to besmirch a very good pitcher in Gaylord Perry…

But this is exactly the sort of anecdotal evidence that prevented baseball from moving forward analytically for, literally, decades.

It’s the same sort of thinking that leads to so many young pitchers getting injured and losing their careers because coaches tell them they need to throw more to develop arm strength before they’re 25 when the medical and statistical evidence is strongly against that.

It’s the same sort of thinking that leads to 36 year old back up infielders getting major league jobs for a million dollars per year when any kid in AAA could provide the same abilities for the major league minimum.

The simple fact is that before the publication of The Hidden Game of Baseball way the heck back when no one had really tried to do any real analysis to see if the conventional wisdom actually was true. And in many many cases it wasn’t.

Aside: One of the things that made Earl Weaver such a great manager was that he appears to have instinctively known some of these things long before anyone ever tried to prove it. Things he brought to the game included “Never play for one run unless that run will win the game” and “The best place for a rookie pitcher is long relief because it’s low pressure and won’t wear him out”. Both breakthrough concepts then and still true today.