Why Barry Bonds Should Make the Hall of Fame

Let’s get this straight up front: I dislike Barry Bonds.  Really can’t stand him.  He was almost certainly the most arrogant athlete of his time, and it looks an awful lot like he cheated and broke the law.  If you put a gun to my head and made me guess, I’d say he probably took steroids.  But he should be voted in to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

Why?  Let me provide a few reasons:

1.  He was a Hall of Fame player before he ever touched steroids.  By the time he showed up at (then) Candlestick Park, Barry Bonds had already won two MVP awards, and he won another for the Giants while he was still whippet-thin.  He averaged over 36 home runs per year during the 1990s; for comparison, during Hank Aaron’s most productive decade (the 1960s), Aaron averaged 37.5 home runs.  Bonds was one of the best-fielding left fielders of all time, garnering 8 gold gloves.

It seems unlikely that Barry Bonds would have broken Hank Aaron’s record without steroids, if we presume that he took them to his advantage, more because it allowed him increased longevity than anything else.  But he already had 455 home runs before the 2000 season even started, and he still had good years left in him.  He was a lock to hit over 500 home runs, steroids or no.

This is a poor argument on its own, though.  If accomplishments before scandal could rocket a person into the Hall, then both Pete Rose and Joe Jackson should have their place there.  But there’s more.

2.  His steroid use is still (largely) unproven.  I said above: it looks an awful lot like…, and it does.  His trainer was clearly around steroids.  He had an association of some kind with Victor Conte’s awful BALCO labs.  But wait: I employed a trainer, a while ago.  I honestly have no idea whether that trainer used steroids, or whether he supplied them to others.  Why would I know that?  Furthermore, why would I even care?  As long as he’s not supplying them to me.

Apparently, in documents leaked from his grand jury testimony, Bonds admitted that he used “the clear” and “the cream,” both steroids.  He said in the testimony that he did not know that they were steroids, and of course there is nothing in the testimony that indicates how long he took whatever it is he took.  Still, this is not pretty.

Probably the next-most damning circumstantial evidence against Bonds is his body.  He was rail-thin, and then suddenly he ballooned.  Many scientists believe that the maximum amount of muscle an adult male can add in any 12-month period without the aid of hormone therapy is 15-20 pounds.  The theory on Bonds goes, “He added more muscle than a human is supposed to be able to add.”

But even that isn’t necessarily so.  Bonds weighed in at 185 in 1986, then at 206 in 1997, then 226 in 2001.  He added 20 pounds in four years, after adding 21 in the ten years prior.  He might very well have used steroids, but he might have been working out.  Esquire Magazine reported in 2001 that Bonds worked out five days a week, five hours a day.  That would tend to add some muscle.

The other proof point often offered for Bonds’ steroid use is what is perceived as a huge jump in his statistics.  But that might not be exactly what it seems, either:

Most people divide Bonds’ career into two phases: pre-steroid allegations, and post-steroid allegations.  They often use the 1999 season as the dividing line.  And it looks pretty bad: from 1986 to 1998, Bonds averaged a .290 batting average, with 32 home runs and 93 RBI.  From 1999 to 2007, Bonds averaged .328, with 49 homers and 105 RBI.

But, like most statistics, the devil might just be in the details: As reported on the blog “Cosellout“, if you took a different stance and did not pre-convict the man of steroid use, you might separate his career into three phases instead of two: a developmental phase, a growth phase and a developed phase, each six years long (well, let’s make the developmental phase seven, just to include his rookie year).  That would look more like this:

In the developmental phase, Bonds averaged .275, with 25 home runs and 79 RBI.  In the growth phase, he averaged .307, with 39 homers and 110 RBI.  In the developed phase, Bonds averaged .328, with 49 home runs and 105 RBI.

Not as dramatic, is it?  It looks even more plausible when we put it up against a similar comparison for Hank Aaron, who clearly had nothing to do with steroids:

In Aaron’s developmental years, he averaged 31 home runs.  In his growth years, he averaged 36.  And in his developed years, he averaged 41.  Hmm.  Maybe what a guy learns about hitting over the years really can help him as he gets older.

Finally: Bonds failed exactly zero drug tests.  He did not experience a drop-off in production (except for injuries) after MLB started testing, he did not retire to get out of the spotlight, and (perhaps most significantly) he did not lose weight after baseball started testing for steroids, as a number of other stars (notably, Jason Giambi and Mark McGwire) did.

Not saying he didn’t benefit from steroids.  But it’s not 100% clear that he did.

3.  Steroids might not make the difference you think they do.  It’s a proven fact: working out while taking steroids will provide you with greater size and strength gains than working out without steroids.  But how much?

Professor Arthur DeVany of UC-Irvine studied home run hitting through the years, and concluded something interesting about the pre-steroid and post-steroid years: there’s no statistically significant difference at all between them.

That runs against the grain of what we’ve been told, but if we dig deeper it makes sense: Hitting home runs is not primarily about raw power.  It’s not a clean-and-jerk; heck, it’s not even shot putting.  It’s about the application of speed.  Put another way: no amount of power is going to help you if you can’t put the barrel of the baseball bat directly onto the baseball.  If it were pure power, then Bo Jackson (who famously broke a bat over his own head after striking out) would have been the greatest home-run hitter ever.  But in Jackson’s eight-year career, he averaged less than 20 home runs.  In the four-year stretch of his prime, he averaged barely over 25.  No — hitting a baseball is fundamentally a skill.

Partly for this reason, but partly because the strength differences are not as dramatic (according to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine) as you might think, Yale physicist Robert Adair, author of the seminal book “The Physics of Baseball,” as well as “Why a Curveball Curves,” has determined that steroids help a person hit home runs, but the difference is not dramatic.

This is very controversial, though: while most scientists seem to think that the difference in bat speed between steroid users and non-steroid users could be as little as two to four percent, which would translate into as little as seven feet on a typical home-run ball, a Tufts statistician has recently suggested that, paradoxically, that small difference could increase home runs by as much as 50 percent.  It’s a very, very hard topic on which to reach conclusions.

Over against that, one also has to wonder: how much did steroids help the pitchers against whom Bonds was hitting?  And the answer appears to be: quite a lot.

Finally, it has been proposed by a number of medical people that drugs that tend to improve concentration and quickness of mind would do a great deal more than steroids to increase a hitter’s results.  We’re perhaps not hearing as much as we should about that side of baseball’s drug problem, aside from a few articles in 2006 about amphetamine use among players being rampant.

I’ll feel a little differently if Bonds becomes a proven intentional user of steroids.  I think then it falls into a simpler category: he will have knowingly broken the rules, precisely as Pete Rose and (maybe) Joe Jackson did.  But as it stands today, I’d have to put him in the Hall.