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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Forget the nostalgia freaks droning on and on about the Mythical White Ballplayer era. Barry Bonds is the greatest player in baseball history.
Oct 25, 2002 | It took the Chinese nearly two millennia to discover perspective. Baseball, as we know it, is only about 100 years old, so perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on baseball writers who have yet to acquire it.
It positively amazes me that everyone now watching Barry Bonds can't understand that they're watching the greatest player in the history of baseball. Now that I've said that, I'm going to backtrack a bit. I think there's something, I don't know what, but something behind Bonds' incredible post-age 36 performance that is not -- well, how should I put this? Never mind, I don't know how to put it. No player in baseball history, no athlete in baseball history, has approached the level of performance of Bonds after the age of 36.
I may have given the wrong impression earlier this year when I mentioned this fact in connection with steroid use in baseball. I wasn't implying that Bonds was using steroids. I was suggesting very strongly that if steroids are not studied and, if the study warrants, banned, the fans would soon begin to suspect the integrity of all baseball statistics -- and then, inevitably, that of the game itself. If Barry Bonds' incredible three-season binge is due to steroids, then it would stand to reason that some other player would have similar numbers or at least have increased his earlier numbers along the same percentages that Bonds has. Nobody has, so I'll leave off the steroid discussion for now.
What I am suggesting is that something -- Laser eye surgery? Mastery of whip-handled maple wood bats? Body armor that takes away the fear of being hit and/or energizes his muscles (as it is said to do with some power lifters)? Any combination of the previous? Something I haven't thought of? Something I haven't thought of plus some combination of the previous? Just that he's a genetic freak? -- has given Barry Bonds an enormous boost over his fellow players, something by no means illegal but something other players haven't caught up with yet. If that's the case, Bonds has a great deal in common with at least one other great player in baseball history, Babe Ruth, a point which I'll get back to in a moment.
Meanwhile, we have this to work with: Until somebody comes up with evidence to the contrary, Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player in history. That's what the evidence says. I really don't believe that under the same conditions and against the same opposition, at the same time, that Bonds is a greater player than Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, or Joe Morgan at their peaks, but that's just my gut feeling. The evidence says Barry Bonds is the greatest.
The undeniability of Bonds' greatness has sent the old boy network into a frenzy of spin control. Baseball is plagued by many things, most of them typified by interviews with Doris Kearns Goodwin whimpering about how much better the game was when she was a little girl in Brooklyn. It's this kind of mentality that never really lets baseball grow up for new generations. Whenever a new candidate for greatness comes along, he's always pushed into the background and told that he doesn't quite measure up to the heroes of the Golden Age of White Guys. Can you imagine this happening in basketball or football? Can you imagine someone telling Michael Jordan that he isn't quite as great as the great stars of the 1920s and '30s?
Yet, this attitude is so pervasive in baseball that even many younger writers who ought to know better can't be budged from it. For instance, a couple of weeks ago we had the Washington Post's Tom Boswell telling us that (as the headline to his Oct. 9 column put it) "Bonds' Feats Are Ruthian, But He's No Babe." Boswell has often demonstrated an uncommon mastery of baseball statistics, but in this argument something jumped the track. Bonds, he says, is merely trying "to be the best baseball player since Babe Ruth." According to Boswell, "Bonds needs to reach a World Series, and probably win one, to separate him from the likes of Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Hank Aaron. Don't clutter the debate beyond that." I dunno, the debate already seems pretty cluttered to me.
First of all, Boswell lumps together Willie Mays, who has two World Series rings, Hank Aaron, who has one, Ted Williams, who has one, and Joe DiMaggio, who has nine. What's the point? Is Boswell actually suggesting that before this season Barry Bonds did not deserve to be ranked with Williams, Mays, Aaron, or, for that matter, DiMaggio because he had never been in a World Series?
