"Pure hitter" doesn't really jibe with the amount of horse testosterone coursing through his veins.

bonds already had the best swing and possibly the best turn around in his swing of any player in the league before he quit being bruce banner. he won gold gloves. he won mvp's. he was one of the best players. the final third of his career is shaping up to be more about controversy and supplements and ridiculous late career numbers but he's still in the top five. easily.

I'd never argue Bonds wasn't a superstar hitter, a Hall of Fame lock. I saw him play before the ridiculous bulk-up. That's what makes all this even MORE of an asshole move. He was already great, but he chose to fuck with it.


Result? Asshole.

He was already great, but he chose to fuck with it.

that has been part of my point in this issue.

is bonds the only person in the majors taking what he's supposed to be taking? of course not.

is bonds the only person in the majors approaching one of the most highly regarded records in baseball, maybe all of sports? yep.

how many home runs have the chemicals hit? i'm sure he's using shit to help bulk up but he also lifts all the time, works out in other ways, and eats right. plus he was one of the greatest players ever to begin with.

maybe asshole sportswriters would settle for half an asterik? a quarter of one perhaps?

The asshole sportswriters aren't "settling" for it. Bonds is.

The question "how many home runs have the chemicals hit?" wouldn't need to be asked if he had never taken them AND lied about it AND been a complete dick about his transparent denials.

That question is asked because of a choice Bonds made, not the sportswriters.

As a person: Crappy douche bag.

As a player good/bad for the game: Watery crap with recognizable parts of last nights dinner.

As a ballplayer: Not Crap, but fraudulent not crap. He admitted to 'unknowlingly' rubbing shit all over himself. Does anyone really believe this? That said, he was a posterboy for five tool player for a lot of years.

But no one gets better as they age as did Bonds. Aaron, as we know holds the record, was remarkably consistent throughout his career. He had power as a young man, and as an 'old' man when he eventually wound up breaking Ruth's record. So did Ruth once the ball got live.

Of course, now that I'm writing about it, I can't find the link that I saw yesterday that broke their homers down by age in a tidy little table, so I'll look it up in Total Baseball. [See what I do for strangers?]

Ruth: 19-24 yrs: 49 HRs. [Of course the first few of those he was a pitcher that they--the Red Sox--eventually phased into RF. But in the last two of those seasons he led the league with 11 and 29, respectively. Can you see the live ball coming?]

25-29yrs: 189 HRs.

30-34: 232 HRs It goes up, yes, but he also had the arrival of Gehrig hitting behind him.

35-39: 216 HRs. About what you'd expect to surpirising given the non-existent state of off-season conditioning.

40-41: 28 HRs. Exactly what you'd expect.

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Now, our man Aaron:

20-24: 140 HRs. He got his start in the majors a year later than Ruth, but I'd submit he was more of a finished player because he'd been in the Negro Leagues for a few years, didn't dick around with pitching, and the game had adjusted for playing in the live ball era. The former and the middle are self-explanatory, but the former, I'm not too certain about, but it seems like it'd have some effect on things--e.g., pitching strategy, more power hitters means more protection, etc.

25-29: 202 HRs. These are the agreed upon ages of a player's prime.

30-34: 168 HRs. I wonder if anyone knows whether he had some injury troubles during these years? He had an 'off' year in '64. Look it up. I wish my fantasy team could have an off year like that. The last two of these years were the Braves first in Atlanta, and he led the league with 44 and 39 HRs.

35-39: 203 HRs. Isn't this a similar number to his late 20's?

40-42: 42 HRs.

I'd submit that the trend we can anticipate with Aaron contra Bonds is that Aaron was a much more productive power hitter as a young man and in his prime power years. Bonds defies conventional wisdom by improving in his late, late 30s.

==========

Bonds, yuck.

22-24: 65 HRs. He gotta late start because he was busy playing college ball. But everyone thought he was going to be a really good 30-30 guy, remember?

25-29: 157 HRs. The last of these years he hit 46. That was the 93 season, his first in SF.

30-34: 189 HRs. Getting better. Quite believeable for several reasons: First, you could make a solid case that he just became a better hitter, i.e., knowledge of the zone, picking up pitches, anticipating pitches, etc. Second, these were the expansion years. Specifically, Colorado. You have more AAA pitchers in the league, and a bunch of them pitch in 1/8th gravity in Denver. But this section of his career is much more in line with the previous one, rather than the next one.

35-39: 247 HRs. This includes the '01 season with 73 HRs and the '02 season he hit .370 just to piss people off. The first of these years was 1999, the year after Sosa/Mcguire year. Notice how his average dipped to .262 that year? I'd say he was gearing up to become the monster he is now.

40-42, now: 55 HRs.

===========

Ted Williams might be the best hitter in his old age. He also might be the most comparable to the present day Bonds, with plate discipline, average, and power all considered. He might also be comparable in that he was an SOB. Here's his age breakdown just for giggles:

21-24: 91HRs. The last of those years he led the AL with 37.

He misses 4 years to the war. [I'll try to account for these years later.]

28-29: 70 HRs. Unbelieveable. Didn't miss a beat. Got better!

30-34: 127 HRs. He missed essentially the last of these to another war, was Maverick to John Glenn's Iceman, and landed a jet that was burning and effectively had no controls because he knew if he punched out he'd break his knees and never play ball again. The French just can't make these kinds of men.

35-39: 132 HRs. Another zinger: His first year back from war, '53, he only played 37 games and hit 13 homers doing it.

40-42: 59 HRs.

Williams lost about 5 years throughout his prime to the service. I submit that if you give him approximately 35 HRs for each of those seasons, you'd have him at 696, so we'd have to say that he belongs in this discussion because of his power, ability at an older age, and his plate discipline, which is what makes Bonds so amazing.

============

Now, can anyone tell me if Bobby Crosby's really going to snap out of it this year and have that magical MVP season that he's supposed to have for my fantasy team, or what. This kid pisses me off.

That question is asked because of a choice Bonds made, not the sportswriters.

it's absolutely asked because of sportswriters. sportswriters hate a broken record. it interrupts the mystique. how many books, documentaries, songs, poems, and i guess t-shirts were rendered useless by the red sox winning the series?

they fucked with maris through no fault of his own. bonds brings shit down on himself but unless major league baseball shows that he violated their rules and does something about it everybody working for the dallas star or wherever can shut the fuck up about the sanctity of a fucking game.

How many books, documentary, songs, etc, were the result of the Sox winning?


Bonds took steroids. Unless you can show me evidence that a sports columnist held a gun to his head to make him do it, then this absolutely is BECAUSE of Bonds. He chose. And now he's paying (very, very lightly).

Lemuel Gulliver wrote:But no one gets better as they age as did Bonds.

I don't think anyone's arguing he didn't use steroids.

The numbers game, it's tough if not impossible to compare 'deterioration with age' of today's players to to that of players from even twenty years ago. Training technique (_legal_ stuff) is much more advanced now.

And, as you suggest in your Bonds capsule, there are always a million reasons why one guy may have had an era-specific advantage in a particular area over a guy who played in a different era.

Plus I think maybe Barry Bonds used steroids, whereas those other athletes probably didn't.

I completely understand hating Bonds for being an asshole. Me, I kind of admire him for being totally upfront about being an asshole. Most professional athletes make nice with sportswriters that they despise and hide their asshole tendencies at all costs. They save that shit for the clubhouse. Bonds never played that, for whatever reason, and I kind of admire it on some level.

He's too much of a prick to admire as a person generally, but that little thing, I kind of like.

He's a lightning rod right now because, in addition to being a prick, he is the most wildly successful advertisement for steroids in the history of athletics. And people don't think he's been punished for it. Punished for something that a shitload of other guys did as well, just not with the insane results that he got by combining it with being one of the great players of his generation.

Like I said, I'd kind of like to see him hit 800 home runs, just to piss people off--like you said, I think that was probably 70% of the reason he hit .370 that one year.

But I'd like to see Pujols hit 74 this year even more.

I kind of admire him for being totally upfront about being an asshole.

i feel exactly the same way. if one guy is a prick but tries to hide it for his own gain that makes him more of a prick. bonds has no time for the needless tributaries of being a professional athlete and he makes no bones about that. at least he's honest about how useless he thinks sportswriters are.

Bonds took steroids. Unless you can show me evidence that a sports columnist held a gun to his head to make him do it, then this absolutely is BECAUSE of Bonds.

bonds took steroids. he is paying lightly. this is major league baseball's fault. the punishment at least. it's not up to columnists to try and harangue him in print or undercut his accomplishments. if they think he's done wrong they should be hounding the front office for a real investigation and a real determination about what to do with the giant-headed man that is pissing through their sacred tome.

tmidgett wrote:The numbers game, it's tough if not impossible to compare 'deterioration with age' of today's players to to that of players from even twenty years ago. Training technique (_legal_ stuff) is much more advanced now.

And, as you suggest in your Bonds capsule, there are always a million reasons why one guy may have had an era-specific advantage in a particular area over a guy who played in a different era.

Agreed. It occurred to me right after I posted that there's the problem of park effects, being lefty or righty, etc. "Comapring across eras" is contentious. People like Bill James will tell you that it's impossible and then proceed to write books doing just that. I'd suggest it is possible, in principle, and that's what makes the game great. E.g., "Old men don't hit home runs." "But those old men didn't have legal protein shakes and Nautilus machines..."

tmidgett wrote:I completely understand hating Bonds for being an asshole. Me, I kind of admire him for being totally upfront about being an asshole. Most professional athletes make nice with sportswriters that they despise and hide their asshole tendencies at all costs. They save that shit for the clubhouse. Bonds never played that, for whatever reason, and I kind of admire it on some level.

He's too much of a prick to admire as a person generally, but that little thing, I kind of like.

I think I know what you mean. I've always liked Williams. There's something you have to admire about hubris. He didn't gladhand people. He'd call his dear teammates Pesky and Dom DiMaggio dumbshits for not taking his advice on hitting and how they'd open their hips up and never hit anything to the wall. And they were dumbshits: Look what he did. I heard a story about him talking to himself/yelling at the BP pitcher saying "You think you can throw to me, I'm Ted Fucking Williams, etc." in order to get up for games.

Perhaps for me and a lot of people, then, it's that someone like Williams is filtered down through history. I don't have to see him being an asshole everytime I want to sit on my can and watch a ballgame. But then again he wasn't knocking on the door of the sacred. And I'd also suggest from the bios of Williams I've read that he wasn't nearly the asshole Bonds is. Of course, Joe DiMaggio wasn't the prince everyone thought he was.

tmidgett wrote:He's a lightning rod right now because, in addition to being a prick, he is the most wildly successful advertisement for steroids in the history of athletics. And people don't think he's been punished for it. Punished for something that a shitload of other guys did as well, just not with the insane results that he got by combining it with being one of the great players of his generation.

Agreed. Grudgingly. I wouldn't bet that he'd be at 713 were it not for the cream and the clear and HGH and whatever the hell else. With any hope this investigation will only be slightly less embarassing than the last 10 years of the power surge. [Don't bet on it: MLB is only exceeded by the NHL in its mastery of never failing to bungle a good thing.]

tmidgett wrote:Like I said, I'd kind of like to see him hit 800 home runs, just to piss people off--like you said, I think that was probably 70% of the reason he hit .370 that one year.

But I'd like to see Pujols hit 74 this year even more.

That .370 was pretty good one , wasn't it?

I've been thinking about it this way: If the next time he comes up to the plate he sustains some career-ending injury, wouldn't public opinion somehow sway his way? Like, all the speculation whether he would have done it would outweigh that he's an admitted (though 'unknowing') steroid user? I'd bet it would. At least the 'what ifs' would. So I say, let him end how he ends. It'll be better for the game if when all is said and done, the public can separate him in the record books with or without some sort of asterisk and know that the accomplishments of Ruth and Aaron are far more formidable.

I heard this morning Pujols is on pace for 80+. And his back's been hurt this past week. This guy is the amazing one.