Barry Bonds Ruined Baseball For Me

From his father, Bobby Bonds, a 14-year-MLB veteran, Barry inherited two key traits during childhood that greatly shaped the tremendous baseball player he would become. The first, his athleticism. In addition to Bobby, an All-Star with the San Francisco Giants, Barry’s uncle Robert was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs. His aunt Rosie was an Olympic hurdler. His godfather? The one and only Willie Mays. The second was his perceived lack of reverence for the game which stemmed partly from his father frequently enduring racial taunts on the field. Like his athleticism, the other part was natural, I guess. Both father and son chose to excel without embracing their heroism. Barry, in particular, always seemed content to accept a walk rather than take an unadvised cut at a poor pitch. You can blame Bonds for plenty over the course of his 22 year career, but being blessed from birth with genetic excellence and having a predisposed mindset to treat the game more like a paycheck then a past time are not one of them.

At Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California Bonds was a dominant athlete in baseball, basketball and football. He went on to become a prep All-American before being drafted by the Giants in the second round of the 1982 MLB Draft. Generally speaking, high school seniors drafted that high go straight to the pros, it isn’t even a discussion. But Bonds rejected a $70,000 offer, instead opting to play in college at Arizona State when the Giants failed to meet his minimum demand of $75,000 to sign. In college Bonds thrived on the field. Over four successful seasons with the Sun Devils, he hit .347 with 45 home runs (HR) and 175 runs batted in (RBI). But personally, he struggled to get along with teammates, instead opting to watch cartoons, cruise Tempe in his Trans Am or spend time with his girlfriend, Leslie. Friction rose between Barry and his teammates. Once, it got so bad that his teammates actually voted to kick him out of the program if he could not find a way to buy back into the team mentality and regain their trust. But guys as talented as Bonds don’t get kicked off teams. And he didn’t.

During the 1985 draft five players were taken ahead of Bonds — 1st B.J. Surhoff (Mil) 2nd Will Clark (SF) 3rd Bobby Whitt (Tex) 4th Barry Larkin (Cin) 5th Kurt Brown (CHW) — before the Pittsburgh Pirates chose the much heralded five tool prospect (speed, arm strength, hitting for average, hitting for power, fielding) sixth overall. After four relatively successful albeit quiet years, Bonds made a big leap in production and helped lead an emerging Pirates team to the postseason for the first time since winning the World Series in 1979. He captured his first two MVP awards in 1990 and 1992 but after three straight gut-wrenching losses in the NLCS he opted to leave Pittsburgh. In addition to the natural disappointment that came from tough playoff exits (his performance included), the Pirates had controversially agreed to trade Bonds in 1991 to Atlanta before the deal fell through when Manager Jim Leyland blocked the decision. Management responded by holding on to their prized hitter for one more season, but failing to present a formidable offer when the big market coastal teams pursued his services in free agency.

So Bonds went home to San Francisco where his father and godfather had played a combined 31 of 48 seasons during their respective careers. At the tune of $43.75 million (the highest contract in baseball history at the time) expectations were high for Bonds and right off the bat, he delivered. Over 15 seasons with San Francisco, Bonds hit .312 with 586 HR, 1440 RBI, 263 stolen bases (SB), 1947 walks and 575 intentional walks. But empty stats simply don’t do his excellence justice. For 35 years the three greatest home run hitters of any era — the holy trinity if you will — had been Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willy Mays. That was until Bonds moved to the Bay Area. From 1993 to 2004 (the last truly great Bonds season) he averaged 44 HRs and 107 RBIs. Averaged. Between 2000 and 2004 he never hit less than 45. In 2001 Bonds hit 73, the most ever for a single season. Factoring out the walks, that’s approximately one HR in every seven at bats. In his younger years, Bonds was quick too. He stole 514 bases total. That makes him not only sole member of the 500 HR/500 steal club but also the only member of the 400 HR/400 steal club.

Since 2001, the Giants have played their home games in AT&T stadium which rests just on the edge of San Francisco’s China Basin, better known as McCovey Cove (named after legendary Giant Willie McCovey). The cove rests about 366 feet from home plate down the right field line and for left handed batters, hitting one into the cove has become a novelty at the park. In fifteen seasons, between both the home Giants and the visitors, there’s only been 68 “Splash hits” and Bonds has 35 of them. Opposing pitchers feared his power so much that most simply walked him. For as good a home run hitter as he was, Bonds was an even better walker.

He has the most intentional walks (IBB) in baseball history by a hilariously wide margin — 1st: Bonds 688 2nd: Hank Aaron 293 and 3rd: Albert Pujols 299. Only four players have ever had multiple seasons with 30+ intentional walks: Pujols ‘08–10, Willie McCovey ‘69–70, Ryan Howard ‘06–07 and Bonds ’92-93, ’96-97, ’01-04 and ’06-07. From ‘93–07 Bonds received more intentional free passes than the Twins, A’s, Orioles, White Sox, Rangers, Blue Jays, Tigers and Royals. This peaked at an absurd level in ‘01–04 where with 284, Bonds had more IBBs than the entire St. Louis Cardinals team combined (260), who were second for drawing intentional passes during that time frame.

But not everything was intentional. Even more walks can be attributed to his famously good eye. Bonds drew so many walks the hard way that many believe umpires would regularly bend the rules for him on close pitches because, ‘if he didn’t swing..it must have been a ball right?’ Between his 688 IBBs and 1,870 standard ones, Bonds could have walked from AT&T park to the center of Oakland and back twice and it still wouldn’t have matched the distance he walked as a major leaguer. Full disclosure, this final stat nearly made me fall out of a chair; 26.3% of Bonds’ 12,606 career plate appearances ended in either a walk or home run, which is highlighted by a stretch in (you guessed it) ‘01–04 where Bonds played 573 games and reached base in 539 of them (94%). Oh yeah, he also won five more MVPs, nine Silver Sluggers, five Gold Gloves and made it to the All-Star Game eleven times.

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If that doesn’t give you an idea of how dominant Bonds was during his time in San Francisco consider this. There’s a sabermetric stat called on-base slugging percentage (OPS) which essentially measures a player’s value in terms of getting on base and hitting for power, two of the most essential offensive skills. Bonds holds three of the top five regular season records for this stat (1st, 2nd and 4th with Babe Ruth being 3rd and 5th). To put this in context: if a player were to go an entire season where every game he went 2/5 (.400) with a single and a home run their OPS would still be lower then Bonds’ in 2004 and 2002. That’s just silly. In video games you can edit your player and max out their stats to 100 so that every time you hit a fastball it soars not only into the stands but sometimes out of the stadium. That’s what watching Bonds was like. Seeing his home run swing was like hearing Chance the Rapper pop up on Ultralight Beam for the first time. And as a kid, growing up in the Bay Area bonding with my estranged father over baseball, Bonds and the Giants set the standard for what I came to expect; home runs and lots of them. They also created the foundation for why I can’t seem to rope myself back into the sport now, they were too unrealistic.

Statistically speaking, his time with San Francisco alone was enough to secure his plaque in Cooperstown, and that’s not even considering the seven years with Pittsburgh where he hit 176 HRs, gathered 556 RBIs, stole 256 bases, collected those two early MVPs and took home 3 more Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards. While his success in the batter box was unparalleled, it never seemed to help the Giants thrive in the postseason as they only made four trips — ’97, ’00, ’02 and ’03 — to October. Worse yet, Bonds never became the hero to save baseball like he could have.

In 1994 the media lamented him for divorcing his first wife — and mother of his first two children — after making her sign a prenuptial agreement waiving the right to a share of his present and future earnings. Allegations of abuse surfaced too. Throughout his career he’s been ice cold with the media. And they’ve fired back: calling him things like surly, dismissive, grumpy, selfish, ungrateful and anything in between. The criticisms Bonds faced weren’t of the ‘he’s just a private guy maybe a little prickly around the edges but just likes to keep to himself’ variety; they were worse. At times he was down right rude to most people — players, teammates, coaches, prestigious baseball writers — it didn’t matter. On the road, no one got boo’d louder than Bonds. Not even A-Rod. When he was chasing the single season home run record in 2001, most fans elected to either root against him or simply not to care. Even amidst his accomplishments, you couldn’t help but feel like he tried to make the ambiance in which he operated as unpleasant as possible just to make the others around him’s lives more difficult. I didn’t understand this at ten years old, to me he was just a long ball followed by unmatchable joy waiting to happen.

“I could learn how to press ‘Record’ on a tape recorder and write for a newspaper or a magazine,” Bonds once said. “But could you ever be good in baseball? Probably not. So don’t degrade what I do, because I could put you to zero.”

As time goes on, it’s become even more concrete that Bonds was the poster boy for baseball’s steroid era, a truth that I wrestled with in my early teens, forcing me to lose general interest in the sport. Between the mid-90’s and mid-00’s the game saw its highest rate of slugging in a long diverse history. The first big highlight came in 1998 when Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa put on a chase of who could pass baseball’s most protected record, Roger Maris’ 61 home runs during the 1961 regular season. In the 70 seasons between 1928 and 1998, only Maris and Babe Ruth had hit over 60.

The two were perfectly cast. McGuire played the part of an old-fashioned chest thumping power hitter, white america’s poster boy during the first half of the century. And Sosa was the champion for Latin America, the place where a majority of the game’s most prolific players hail from, a window to the future. The two handled the honor of passing Maris with class; they spent an appropriate amount of time with the media, paid their respects to the greats and most importantly did so with a certain element of joy. Bonds never fit that mold. Some say he became obsessed with getting the same recognition as Sosa and McGuire, and that’s what led him to experiment with steroids in the first place. If you can’t beat em, join them, perhaps. As the era wore on, players like Jose Canseco, Luis Gonzalez, Brady Anderson Greg Vaughn and Albert Belle, began to eclipse copious amounts of home runs. Through March of 2004, 18 players had hit 50 or more home runs since 1993, the same amount as in the 128 years of Major League Baseball before.

In 2004 Bonds stood three home runs shy of passing Willie Mays into third all time for a career. This coincided exactly with his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, being placed under indictment for the illegal distribution of steroids and human growth hormone (HGH) in a high profile Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) scandal. When federal agents discovered Bonds’ name among those who received HGH from Anderson, the home run king denied it. Even when evidence reigned down on Bonds like one of those freshly dented balls landing in McCovey Cove, he couldn’t face the music, as he admitted only to using a small cream that Anderson issued him to help with nutrition and arthritis. The lies and disregard began to pile up.

Public perception soured even further when high profile players like Sosa, McGuire, Canseco, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmiero, Ken Caminiti, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield either admitted to or were accused of abusing steroids along with Bonds. In 2007, under the request of Commissioner Bud Selig back in 2006, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell released a 409-page report detailing his investigation of steroid abuse throughout Major League Baseball. 89 players were named in the report, including Bonds.

He ultimately hit those three home runs, passing his godfather moving into third all time. Even with his reputation fully tainted by now, Bonds kept swinging. In May 2006, at age 41, he passed Babe Ruth for second all time. Later that September, he passed Aaron. The ball he hit to claim the top spot, and the technical title of home run king, was sold for $752,467. Bonds ended his career with 762 home runs, a fortune financially, countless accusations of steroid abuse and very few friends to show for it. In 2007 he was indicted on account of committing perjury during his testimony in the BALCO case. In 2008 a typo in the court documents forced prosecutors to postpone the trial. Simultaneously, the Giants quietly chose not to resign Bonds and he quietly faded into obscurity despite maintaining that he wasn’t retired up until 2011. No one wanted him.

Even as his aura faded Bonds found new ways to alienate whatever fans remained. He withdrew from the MLB Players Association because he wanted to chase more lucrative individual marketing deals. This forced most popular baseball video games, like MVP Baseball 2005, to remove his likeness (will the real Jon Dowd please stand up) even to the detriment of their consumers. In 2011 he was convicted of perjury and even though the result was overturned in 2015, people still call him a convict. Bonds breifly came back with the Giants in the spring of 2014 as a temporary hitting instructor and then-ESPN personality Keith Olberman said on national tv what many wished they could have:

“You cheated the game. You dishonored the game. The game has been better off with you forgotten, with you in the wilderness, with your statistics as meaningful as video game numbers.”

Today, some want his head, some want him to just go away and others would leave his accomplishments but permanently tarnish them with a big fat asterisk. I think I want him to just admit that he took fucking steroids. That Bonds, like so many other players during his time, used performance enhancing drugs, was never really the issue. It was more that he was a total dick about it. And for that he became the poster boy of an era filled with far too many villains.

For a guy who’s spent the better part of two decades as baseball’s most dominant hitter, Bonds’ most impressive feat might have come after his final at bat, where he’s managed to maintain the lowest of public profiles. For years he’s been silent. No interviews. No tell-alls. Nothing. It’s almost the same way 30 teams were quiet about unceremoniously blackballing him out of baseball as a player in 2008. In that final season Bonds hit .276 with 28 home runs, at age 42. You won’t convince me he couldn’t have played another year, maybe two. In 2016 Bonds finally made his true return to the game when he signed on to serve as a hitting coach for the Miami Marlins. Wearing his traditional #25 jersey, Bonds has helped guide a young Marlins team to a 29–26 record through the first quarter of the season. He shows up on TV from time to time. He looks considerably slimmer then the latter part of his playing days, where either his biceps were erupting through his sleeves or he masked their existence under a jersey one size too big and awkward looking protective elbow guards.

During the team’s media day back in February, reporters spoke with the much-maligned home run king for the first time in nearly a decade. There were no questions about steroids, no questions about the Giants and only a brief mention of the Hall of Fame.

“There’s not one player that ever could say I’m not one,” Bonds told the Associated Press. “There’s not a coach who ever coached me who says I’m not one. In my heart and soul, and God knows, I’m a Hall of Famer.”

To reach Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame, 75% of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America have to vote you in. Four years ago — his first of eligibility — Bonds got 36.2%. This year it increased to 44.3%, making his odds of reaching baseball’s version of a ‘final boss,’ only slightly less of a long shot than anticipated. I can’t help but imagine; what could have been different if Bonds had learned the valuable lesson about camaraderie and gamesmanship if his coaches had backed their player’s decision to kick him off the team at Arizona State? Could some of this have been avoided? Instead of alienating the media who now hold the power to enshrine his accomplishments would he have taken the time to be kinder, more considerate? Would he have just admitted to using steroids in the first place, knowing that his accomplishments prior to the allegations were most likely enough merit strong consideration alone? What about if he had known guys like Andy Pettite and Mark McGuire, to some degree, would be forgiven once they confessed their sins? Neither the Pirates or Giants have officially retired Barry’s number. That has to mean something.

As a 24 year old self proclaimed, former baseball lover, it’s become evident that I picked the wrong guy. For every record Bonds ascended to and for all the joy that his climb gave me as a child; I find a comparable level of discomfort and disappointment, learning what he did and who he was. I didn’t know then, but I do now, and that stinks. There will never be another Barry Bonds, so how now, can I root for someone else that probably won’t live up to my child hood hero? My appreciation for greatness peaked. When the Giants won the World Series in 2010 — the first time since 1954 — I was happy, but not as sad as I was when the Giants lost in Game 7 to Anaheim in 2002. 2012 and 2014 brought two more championships, which is great, and we’re in an even year, so who knows? I sincerely do enjoy watching Buster Posey, I really liked Tim Lincecum and Hunter Pence is my kind of guy. But the reason I loved Jeff Kent, Rich Aurilia, Benito Santiago and even J.T. Snow was because I loved Barry Bonds. The reason I call myself a Giants fan today is because I loved Barry Bonds. The reason I liked baseball was because I loved Barry Bonds. And how can I love baseball now, when baseball doesn’t even care about Barry Bonds? Maybe I never really liked this game; maybe I just needed someone to believe in, when the rest of the world seemed like it was crumbling around me.