Barry Lamar Bonds

[witesoxfan]

Someone said he "broke the greatest American sports record".

True?

 

Can you think of any other record in American sports that's as heralded as the all-time home run record? I can't. Brett Favre is going to set like every meaningful record for a QB this upcoming season, and I'm not sure how many people, football fans included, even care, and that's really the only other sport on the level of either baseball or football.

 

So yeah, I'd say he broke the greatest American sports record.

[DrunkBomber]

I think the fact that its an individual achievement in a team sport and that it was set as such a high bench mark is what gave it its mystique. When Emmitt Smith broke Paytons record it was considered one of the bigger sports achievements but nobody would be able to break it without a good line, fullback etc. This record was special because its just the batter and the pitcher out there and you can do it no matter how bad everyone else on your team is.

[jackie hayes]

Mere hunch, but I think 35 is understating it quite a bit. We'll probably find out for sure within the next 15-20 years when former MLB players wind up dying prematurely due to heart disease and all kinds of cancers and whatever other problems may arise, but I truly believe 35 is shooting way under the bar. I'd guess 20% is more likely - which is 5 per 25-man roster - and perhaps even higher than that.

 

Speculation leads to nothing really, and I find what Bonds did to be remarkable. Some may not, and that's just a difference of opinion.

I wasn't very clear there -- I meant players older than 35. I'd agree with that hunch.

[AirScott]

Can you think of any other record in American sports that's as heralded as the all-time home run record? I can't. Brett Favre is going to set like every meaningful record for a QB this upcoming season, and I'm not sure how many people, football fans included, even care, and that's really the only other sport on the level of either baseball or football.

 

So yeah, I'd say he broke the greatest American sports record.

How about Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak? I think that really becomes the most heralded record now. Everybody mentions it every time someone hits in 30 or 35 straight.

 

And football's records are less heralded because of the history. The record Bonds broke stood for 33 years. The record Aaron broke stood for almost 39 years. Now look at the NFL's all-time leaders in passing yards and touchdowns, and a lot of those quarterbacks played in the 1980s and 1990s. When Dan Marino passed for his 343rd touchdown, surpassing Fran Tarkenton's 342, it was 1995 and 19 years after Tarkenton had retired.

 

Maybe the individual aspect of baseball carries some weight (somebody has to catch the balls Brett Favre and Dan Marino throw), but football doesn't have the same history baseball does. Baseball really hasn't changed since the 1920s, when the home run became a bigger part of the game.

[Balta1701]

Someone said he "broke the greatest American sports record".

True?

Before 2 days ago...yes, it was the single greatest record in American sports.

[Texsox]

It's an incredible accomplishment, steroids or not.

 

Isn't that the point? Without steroids, he's still chasing the record, we'll never know if it would have been an incredible accomplishment. There is no doubt that Bonds is an incredibly gifted baseball player. On his own, he easily would have been a top 5 home run hitter, with a chance of becoming number one. Sadly, we'll never know.

 

We do know, at least most people believe, that Frank's total is legit. Raffy's is not. How do we compare those numbers? Is any comparison fair? That's what makes this so sad and difficult for many baseball fans. For the most part fans accept the "dead ball era" and those sort of anomalies in the history of the game, this doesn't compute the same way. While every baseball fan should have been cheering this accomplishment, some question if it even is an accomplishment.

[Gregory Pratt]

Isn't that the point? Without steroids, he's still chasing the record, we'll never know if it would have been an incredible accomplishment. There is no doubt that Bonds is an incredibly gifted baseball player. On his own, he easily would have been a top 5 home run hitter, with a chance of becoming number one. Sadly, we'll never know.

 

We do know, at least most people believe, that Frank's total is legit. Raffy's is not. How do we compare those numbers? Is any comparison fair? That's what makes this so sad and difficult for many baseball fans. For the most part fans accept the "dead ball era" and those sort of anomalies in the history of the game, this doesn't compute the same way. While every baseball fan should have been cheering this accomplishment, some question if it even is an accomplishment.

 

I don't think Bonds would've come close to Aaron without the juice.

[Texsox]

I don't think Bonds would've come close to Aaron without the juice.

 

And that's a legitimate point of view, and I believe others would say he would have, but in a couple more years. It would also seem that he has traded more seasons with a gradual fade for fewer, higher achieving season. The end seems to come quickly for steroid users. We'll never know for certain.

[Sonik22]

The Best Damn Bonds Exclusive thats on CSN right now is fascinating. Interview with Bonds is great.

[Gregory Pratt]

The latest SI has a look through of Barry Bonds' career, including a picture of his size, age, height/weight, games, BA, OBP, SLG, HR, HR/AB, SB, BB, IBB, Longest HR, quote from Bonds and from someone else.

 

Funny how when he was twenty eight he talked about his peak only lasting four more years or so and he would take advantage of it because you can't hit, steal or field "forever." Funny how when he was thirty one he said, "I'm not going to hit 600 homeruns like my Godfather did." His resentment of McGwire and Sosa at thirty three is remarkable as well. And then when he started to explode and talked about how he can't understand why his linedrives are going over now, at thirty six, on a line over the fence. "Call God. Ask him."

 

Bonds is a great character. I'd like him better if he were fictional.

 

"He's hit the home runs, so you have to give him credit, but he's not Babe Ruth. He will never be Babe Ruth, or Hank Aaron, for that matter."

--Bob Feller.

[SoxFan1]

I'm sure Bob Feller remembers watching Babe Ruth vividly.

[Gregory Pratt]

I'll bet he remembers Ruth as well as we'll remember Bonds from first-hand sight, and that's speaking of you and I who were far too young to watch his beginning and middle and are only old enough to see and understand the end.

 

But let's not turn this into a referendum on Bob Feller. It's just a good quote, and I think it's spot on, personally. Just like I think natural Barry Bonds was right when he said that natural Barry Bonds might not even pass Willie Mays.

[Balta1701]

Career home run No. 470 assumed no special place in Barry Bonds' heart, no enduring niche in his memory bank. After the baseball left Seth Etherton's right hand and Bonds connected, the slugger stopped briefly to assess his handiwork, then departed the batter's box with the businesslike air of a man who had done it that way 469 times before. The ball traveled high and breathtakingly far before coming to rest deep in the right-field seats at then-Edison International Field in Anaheim.

 

When news reports on June 7, 2000, recounted the distance at 493 feet, alarm bells rang, sirens wailed and dishes rattled at Bill Jenkinson's home in Willow Grove, Pa. On the Barry Bonds page of Jenkinson's logbook, the homer merited a red star -- a designation accorded to "historically significant" shots of 450 feet and beyond. But for Jenkinson, the quintessential detail man, something failed to compute. As a long-distance home run historian -- the only one alive, to his knowledge -- Jenkinson is in his element reading stadium seating plans, poring through microfilm and analyzing weather charts in solitude. The payoff comes when he can say he has charted the distance for every homer hit by a Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx or Ted Williams.

 

But Bonds? From a long-distance perspective, he had no business being in the company of Ruth or Foxx.

 

In late spring 2000, Bonds was closing fast on 36. In two decades tracking tape measure jobs, Bill Jenkinson had determined that the peak age for long-distance home run hitting was 25 or 26, at which point sluggers begin a slow, inevitable descent toward the pack. The most notable exceptions, Jenkinson found, were the taller sluggers -- the Willie Stargells and Frank Howards -- who peaked at 28.

 

Jenkinson had always been fascinated with power. In 1956, at age 9, he begged his father to take him to Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium to see the Cincinnati Reds, and he sat enthralled as Wally Post, Frank Robinson and Ted Kluszewski hit moon shots in batting practice. As a fan, Jenkinson gravitated toward all-or-nothing types like Gus Zernial and Stan Lopata. His fascination with All-Star slugger Dick Allen led him to a local library and the newspaper microfilm accounts. His friends all laughed at his transformation into a self-professed "library geek."

 

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the odd prodigious clout started to send up red flags for Jenkinson. He heard rumors about Jose Canseco, Juan Gonzalez and Bo Jackson, and he couldn't help but notice when Jackson hit a ball in Kansas City that traveled 20 feet beyond Dick Allen's standard there. (Jackson has said publicly that he has never used steroids and is pursuing a defamation suit against a newspaper that claimed he did.) Jenkinson was more circumspect when Mark McGwire, known for hitting impressive, though not astronomical, home runs as a young player in Oakland, was smashing homers of 500 feet and beyond in St. Louis well after his 30th birthday.

 

Bonds' monster blast off Etherton was startling because it appeared, for want of a better term, out of thin air. Jenkinson checked his ledgers and found that in Bonds' first 14 seasons, he'd hit only three baseballs farther than 450 feet. All of them were wind-aided. On the day of the Etherton shot -- which Jenkinson estimated at 480 feet -- the wind was a negligible 3-5 mph in Anaheim. Because Bonds had begun a diligent weight-lifting regimen a good seven years before, new training methods couldn't account for it, either. And all that seemed to confirm Jenkinson's deepest suspicion: He thought Barry Bonds was on the juice, and big-time.

 

It didn't require much work for Jenkinson to devise a theory. He believed that Bonds, a better player than McGwire or Sammy Sosa, found it galling that they had achieved so much acclaim from their 1998 home run race and succumbed to the temptation to use steroids to keep pace. Who could argue with the results? After the Etherton homer, the fourth "historically significant" blast of his career, at least by Jenkinson's standards, Bonds hit a mind-numbing 30 more long balls of 450 feet or beyond.

 

"To a person with reasonable intellectual clarity and emotional stability, this should tell you something very compelling," Jenkinson says of his findings. "Barry Bonds has almost certainly used steroids to achieve what he has achieved." Initially, Jenkinson sat on his suspicions, but when Bonds trashed Ruth at the 2003 All-Star Weekend, the gloves came off. Jenkinson was so angry he picked up the phone and shared his research and opinions with Chris "Mad Dog" Russo on WFAN in New York, much to the delight of the station's listeners.

 

Some have said Jenkinson should have kept his decidedly unscientific theories to himself instead of trying to bring down one of baseball's greatest sluggers. But how could he be accused of trashing Bonds' reputation, Jenkinson argues, when the wounds were so obviously self-inflicted?

 

"I think Barry Bonds' legacy is tarnished beyond repair," he says.

 

And if this archivist can't set the record straight, who can?

Great little blurb from Jerry Crasnick a few years back.

[Gregory Pratt]

Bet he believes in global warming, too.

[Texsox]

Great little blurb from Jerry Crasnick a few years back.

 

Balta, as a scientist you know there could be other factors as well that were not looked into. An anomaly with the bat or ball. Wind gusts, etc.

 

Not to defend Bonds, but I can be very suspicious of anecdotal research presented as fact.

[witesoxfan]

"He's hit the home runs, so you have to give him credit, but he's not Babe Ruth. He will never be Babe Ruth, or Hank Aaron, for that matter."

--Bob Feller.

 

Of course not, they didn't steal 500 bases to go along with the home run record.

 

Only half kidding, because Hank Aaron isn't Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds, and Babe Ruth isn't Bonds or Aaron. It's just really an obvious quote, and I truly believe if you try to compare any and all of them, you are never going to get anywhere.

[LosMediasBlancas]

How about Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak? I think that really becomes the most heralded record now. Everybody mentions it every time someone hits in 30 or 35 straight.

 

And football's records are less heralded because of the history. The record Bonds broke stood for 33 years. The record Aaron broke stood for almost 39 years. Now look at the NFL's all-time leaders in passing yards and touchdowns, and a lot of those quarterbacks played in the 1980s and 1990s. When Dan Marino passed for his 343rd touchdown, surpassing Fran Tarkenton's 342, it was 1995 and 19 years after Tarkenton had retired.

 

Maybe the individual aspect of baseball carries some weight (somebody has to catch the balls Brett Favre and Dan Marino throw), but football doesn't have the same history baseball does. Baseball really hasn't changed since the 1920s, when the home run became a bigger part of the game.

 

 

I would have said DiMaggio too. Even though it's one hell of a feat, it was done over a short period of time within one single season.

[Gregory Pratt]

Of course not, they didn't steal 500 bases to go along with the home run record.

 

Only half kidding, because Hank Aaron isn't Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds, and Babe Ruth isn't Bonds or Aaron. It's just really an obvious quote, and I truly believe if you try to compare any and all of them, you are never going to get anywhere.

 

They also didn't take steroids.*

 

*Bonds did.**

 

**"allegedly"***

 

***which means "by his own admission" and "as every bit of evidence suggests except for the fact that he hasn't failed a steroids test which isn't proof of anything except that MLB kept the first batch confidential and that BALCO went out of its way to provide steroids that can't be tested for****

 

****point was, though, that Bonds' accomplishment is diminished and proved not of God's doing or even solely of his own hard work's doing but by his own words before he threw his legacy as one of the game's greats away*****

 

*****that means he got greedy, Martin, and in so doing became what he is said to have hated and threw away the title of "greatness" because great men don't sell their souls or trade their bodies for glory they don't need

Edited August 10, 2007 by Gregory Pratt

[Rowand44]

It's definitely not as heralded but the 191 rbi record is pretty damn impressive as well.

Edited August 11, 2007 by Rowand44