Barry Bonds: The best baseball player who ever lived

By: Kevin Baxter/Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted In: Sports

OK, all you doubters and naysayers, you can put your asterisks away. Barry Bonds is the best baseball player who ever lived, helpful chemistry not withstanding.

And he’ll be universally recognized as such in, oh, about 50 years. In the meantime, says baseball historian John Thorn, Bonds will have to be content with simply destroying the game’s most hallowed records while waiting for the public recognition to catch up.

“It’s really difficult for us to see great baseball players in proper perspective in their own day,”says Thorn, the author of five dozen books on baseball, the founding editor of the statistical encyclopedia Total Baseball and the senior creative consultant to Ken Burns’ award-winning PBS miniseries “Baseball.”

“Nobody who watched Joe Morgan or Mike Schmidt thought they were watching two of the greatest players ever,” Thorn says. “No one who watched Rickey Henderson thought this was one of the five greatest players in the history of baseball. You need the distance. The distance tends to improve our view, to burnish our view.”

Bonds’ numbers, however, already have no parallel. He holds the single-season records for home runs (73), slugging percentage (.863), on-base percentage (.582) and on-base slugging (1.381). He has twice as many MVP awards (six) as anyone else. And while just three other players have had at least 300 homers and 300 steals, Bonds has more than 500 of each.

His two home runs last week moved him past godfather Willie Mays into third on the all-time list for career homers (at 665 entering Monday’s game vs. San Diego), and by the end of the season he’ll be the career leader in walks, rank among the top five all-time in slugging percentage and could be among the top 10 in RBI.

He even has changed the way the game is played–opponents walk him nearly a third of the time now, even with the bases loaded.

Oh, and by the way, he’s also won eight Gold Gloves for fielding excellence.

“I’ve never seen a better player in my life,” former teammate Matt Williams said last week. “I don’t think anybody changes the course of a game like he does.”

Yet Bonds, 39, still can’t shake his detractors. Lately the anti-Bonds camp has been pointing to the government’s steroid-trafficking probe that has targeted Bonds’ personal trainer. But, Thorn points out, even if Bonds is shown to have taken steroids–and no evidence has surfaced to prove that–baseball’s rules did not prohibit steroid use before this season. Besides, he needed the help like Nolan Ryan needed another 10 mph on his fastball.

“The whole steroids thing is a red herring,” Thorn says. “There are very few Bonds home runs that would not have been home runs if he were 10 percent less strong. Basically, he’s got a grooved swing and he’s got a mental approach to the game that permits him to use the count to know that he’s going to get, in most cases, one good pitch to hit. He fouls off fewer hitable pitches than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

Still, we hear Bonds is not as dominant as Ty Cobb was, not as versatile as Joe DiMaggio was, not as good as Babe Ruth was. And while it’s hard not to believe racism plays a part in those arguments — Bonds is black while Cobb, DiMaggio and Ruth were white — Thorn says baseball tradition is also at fault. The game, like no other, is passed from generation to generation, so the stars of the past seem to get better as time passes — even as their records fade away.

“Only in baseball do we imagine that players who were on the field 100 years ago — Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb — were the real gods and they would tower over today’s opposition if they could be teleported into it,” Thorn says. “Baseball has gotten better on the field in every decade. The average player on the 25-man roster in 1920 — the average player, not the worst — could not make a 25-man roster today.”

So while Ruth, Cobb and others were dominant in their day, they dominated inferior competition. Blacks were banned from the majors then and few Hispanics — who today account for more than a quarter of all big-leaguers — were welcome, never mind Japanese, Koreans and Chinese. Pitchers threw complete games about half the time, a rate 10 times higher than today. The longest road trip was from New York to St. Louis, and all games were played in the day.

“Most of the starting pitchers on every club would not throw a breaking ball when they were behind in the count,” Thorn says. “The average major-league fastball was probably 85, 86 mph. People bemoan today how terrible pitching is. In fact, pitching is great.”

Bonds is not only rewriting the record book, then, but he’s doing so against far better competition. There can be no doubt, Thorn says, that he’s the best player who has ever played the game.

Just maybe not the greatest. In an essay in the eighth edition of Total Baseball, to be released next month, Thorn makes a distinction between the titles “best” and “greatest” and argues that only the passage of time can lift Bonds past Ruth for both honors.

“What’s really important is not simply what is true and what is real but what people believe to be true and real,” he says. “So I don’t think you can really address the question of who is the greatest if you don’t pay some attention to what people thought on this very subject 50 years, 100 years ago, 150 years. Because people have been asking this question ever since the beginning of baseball.”

___

c 2004, The Miami Herald.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.