The Ol' Ballfield

More Antagonism!

I'm back at it with the unnamed sportswriter! Remember, I may be wrong, he does bring up some good points. Not enough, though! Let's watch:

Hello, it's me again!

I just took a little issue with your flippant reply to Bengie Molina in this excerpt:

Action: New San Francisco Giants catcher Bengie Molina says Barry Bonds is "probably the best player of all time. ... For me, it's exciting just to share the same field and be in the same lineup with a guy who changed the game."

Reaction: Molina obviously is no student of baseball history and isn't aware of how Babe Ruth dominated the sport in the 1920s. Bonds is the best player of the steroids era, possibly because he had the best steroids. He didn't "change the game" until, many of us believe, he began using performance-enhancing drugs.

Now, let me start off by saying that I totally agree with the fact that Babe Ruth, not Barry Bonds, is the best baseball player of all-time. Not, however, for the reasons you think. What I take issue with here is your seeming assumption that Bonds doesn't even come close to having the effect Ruth did on their respective leagues. This is just not true. He comes very close. Damn close.

You're also assuming (this is something I'm just now realizing; honestly this gets more interesting as I go along) that Molina has the same definition of "best player" that you do. Maybe Molina doesn't give a damn about who dominated the sport, he just wants to see who the best, objective player was in baseball, something that will always be changing. Now, this is something that I also happen to agree with you on, but who knows what Bengie thinks. I assume you've never spoken to or met Bengie Molina (please correct me if I'm wrong on this), but him saying something that you don't agree with hardly means that he is no "student of baseball history".

Let's compare Bonds and Ruth by the numbers, eschewing for the moment the steroid argument because, as I'm sure you know, Barry Bonds has never been proven to have taken steroids and, unfortunately for sportswriters, people in this country are innocent until proven guilty. Modern baseball research has enabled us to compare players from different eras, so I'm going to use some of those methods right now. Perhaps the easiest to use and most straightforward is BaseballReference.com's new "neutralize stats" feature. Basically they take the numbers from any given season and reconfigure them as though they had taken place in a year with average offense, ballparks, etc.

So: Barry Bonds' best year was 2002, in which he hit .370/.582/.799 with 46 HR in the NL's worst offensive year since 1991. Babe Ruth's best season came in 1920, when he hit .376/.533/.849, his career high slugging percentage, with 54 HR. Using BBRef to neutralize the stats, we get this:

Bonds: .385/.597/.831, 49 HR
Ruth: .359/.515/.812, 53 HR

If Bonds and Ruth had been playing in the same time, Bonds would have outperformed Ruth in each of their best seasons (hitting-only, of course). How about career numbers?

Bonds: .299/.433/.608, 734 HR
Ruth: .342/.474/.690, 714 HR

Ruth with the advantage. But using the neutralize feature:

Bonds: .303/.446/.614, 761 HR
Ruth: .333/.463/.669, 720 HR

Notice how, in order to even the playing field, Bonds' numbers go up and Ruth's come down. This indicates that Ruth had the advantage of a much more offensive-happy era than Bonds. This feature even adjusts so that Ruth's figures project to a 162-game schedule.

WARP3, Baseball Prospectus' stat, calculates how many wins a given player is worth, adjusting for era, over the average AAA player of the time. This is just a quickie, but Ruth's career WARP3 was 234.2, while Bonds' is 233.1. Note that this is a cumulative stat, and Bonds' career is not over. And this includes fielding, in which the Babe was quite good, probably as good as or better than Bonds, and baserunning, in which Bonds is much better.

The biggest reason that Ruth is a superior ballplayer was his pitching. Prospectus' seminal book, Baseball between the Numbers, does an extensive study comparing the two players. On hitting and fielding merits alone, Bonds comes out on top. But the Babe's pitching contributions push him ahead. I said earlier that Ruth's best season was 1920. In a way that's true, but look at 1916: Ruth threw an ERA of 1.75 with NINE shutouts, as many as Nolan Ryan's 1972 career high, and one shy of Cy Young's 10 (also a career high) in 1904. That is why Ruth is undoubtedly the better player. If you want to talk about out-homering teams, that's fine, but then take a look at Bonds' IBB numbers in the early 2000s for a similar reflection

Now let me ask you: are you a student of baseball history? I assume that you are, which means that you must surely know that the only era in which offense was as favored as the so-called "steroid era" of approximately 1993-2002 was the so-called "live ball era" of the 1920s, when Babe Ruth was in his prime. You say that Bonds is the best player of the "steroids era" very dismissively. Well, Ruth was the best player of the live ball era, the only era that favored offense more than the one Bonds played in. Were steroids a part of Bonds' rise? Maybe. Probably, even. But that doesn't mean the balls didn't leave the park. So much of the offense in the 90s also has nothing to do with steroids: expansion led to depleted pitching staffs, and ballparks got smaller and smaller along with the strikezones.

When Ruth played, three countries were represented in MLB. Now there are players from over 10. Not to mention the hundreds of African-Americans that couldn't play in MLB until 12 years after Ruth retired. How much would he have "dominated" were he forced to play against the best pitchers and alongside the best hitters from the Negro Leagues?

The answer is nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how much worse Bonds would have been without steroids. The only events we can judge are the ones that happened. Even with all those comparative numbers up there, they're not perfect. An extra 8 games per season could have been Ruth's downfall, who knows. But your dismissing Molina's statement so readily is simply irresponsible, and further indicative of your goal, along with countless other sportswriters, to make a scapegoat out of and assassinate the career of Barry Bonds, the greatest baseball player since Babe Ruth.

Carnival Matleuse

The response!

Hey, Carnival, I'm a "flippant" guy. ... In 1921, Babe Ruth hit 59 of the AL's 477 HRs...1922, Ruth hit 35 (bad year for him) of the AL's 525 HRs....in 1923, Ruth hit 41 of the AL's 442 HRs...In 1924, he hit 46 of the AL's 397 HRs....I 1925, he was sick much of the season and only had 25 of the AL's 533 HRs....In 1926, he hit 47 of the AL's 424 HRs....In 1927, he hit 60 of the AL's 439 HRs...In 1928, he hit 54 of the AL's 483 HRs....In 1929, he hit 46 of the AL's 595 HRs....If that was the "live ball era", Ruth must have been swinging at the XXXX-juice balls....His percentage of total HRs is off the charts and Bonds doesn't come close. Measured against their peers, Ruth was far away the better power hitter EVEN AFTER BONDS BEGAN CHEATING!!!!...I don't recall Bonds being rated among the all-time four of five all-time ELITE players until after he took advantage of several years of performance-enchancing drugs. For a guy who loves stats, if you can't see the power surge that defies all logic....Regarding "innocent until proven guilty", no one is talking about throwing Bonds in jail for cheating. He might serve some time for other things but not for using steroids...no offense, if you don't think Bonds used the juice, YOU'RE the one who is naive. There's a guy sitting in a cell who could turn Bonds' world upside down simply by telling us who BB is on all his records...If Bengie Molina says something I absolutely disagree with and defies logic, my job is to respond. Sorry you seem offended. Well, not really sorry, but more like incredulous.

"XXXX-juiced balls??" What?!

The response!

I think Bonds used steroids, but what I think doesn't matter until it's proven that he did. And I believe that the way he played, steroids or no, from 2000-2004 is amazing. That's all I'm saying. And yes, Babe Ruth's home run numbers compared to Bonds' are much more impressive. But what's more important for the "best player of all-time", bald home run numbers, or overall production? On the latter point there can be a fine debate between the two. And you saying objectively that Bonds "cheated" as though there is no argument to the contrary is just as irresponsible as if I were to say there was no argument that he DID cheat, which I never did.

How can you say that Bonds played in such an easier offensive era? I'll do the work for you:

1920-1935: 4.854 runs per game
1993-2002: 4.859 runs per game

.005 runs per game more in the 'steroid era'. I'd call them pretty comparable, wouldn't you? And consider that while Babe Ruth outhomered every team in his era, Barry Bonds out-IBBed every team in his. Now what if he had had Lou Gehrig hitting behind him instead of Jeff Kent?

As far as the cheating argument goes, you obviously don't think Mark McGwire should be in the hall... I don't know if you feel that way about Bonds or not. Do you think Whitey Ford and Gaylord Perry should have their plaques removed? Keep in mind that Perry goes on national tours bragging about how he cheated. That, to me, is far more of a stain on the game than Barry Bonds wowing a generation of baseball fans with a little hormonal augmentation.

Check back for updates as the feud continues!

Labels: barry bonds, sportswriters, steroids

posted by Carnival @ 2/21/2007