Barry Bonds: Your Drug-Adjusted New Greatest Player Ever

Let’s play a game for a minute.

Let’s assume either one of two things.

1.) That either Barry Bonds is 100% steroid-free, and has been for his entire career,
OR
2.) That the addition of steroids to enhance play has the same sort of ethical dilemma as, say, Honus Wagner’s offseason weight lifting or Ernie Banks’s shrinking his bat’s handle diameter.

(By the way, I don’t believe either. Remember, we’re just playing a game.)

In so doing, though, we’re left with a career that warrants a very serious, very real question: is Barry Bonds the greatest player ever? Or at least, better than the commonly believed greatest player ever, Babe Ruth?

Let’s take a look at some numbers…

OPS+
Ruth: 207
Bonds: 182

EqA
Ruth: .368
Bonds: .357

These numbers, admittedly, include neither Bonds’s fantastic defensive career nor Ruth’s pitching prowess. It also ignores all post-season performance. My guess, though, is that Ruth’s 1200 career innings of B- pitching might have a smaller effect on winning than nearly 5200 career putouts in LF. Honestly, though, I’m too lazy to figure it out. Bonds has been an excellent hitter in post-season play for his career; Ruth was out-of-this-world, so I really only want to give a slight advantage to Ruth there. All in all, for factors not included in the above numbers: Advantage Bonds.

But are those mitigating factors enough to crown Bonds as the greater player?

The larger variable in deciding between the two players is in explaining the differences between their eras. We kind of have an understanding that Old Hoss Radbourn is not the greatest pitcher ever; not that he wasn’t the most dominating player among his era of all time (he was), but he was playing in an era where he was allowed to pitch from 50 feet, at 500 innings per year, against lineups often drawn from that day’s crowd. When he puts up Pedro/Koufax/Carlton dominance numbers, we need to remember his respective context and adjust accordingly.

Likewise, Ruth played in an era characterized by an absence of sliders, most minorities including all black players, and about 75% of today’s scouting and minor league organization that go into funneling the greatest players into the Majors. Ruth’s opponents had off-season jobs; Bonds’s opponents did conditioning full-time. Ruth’s opponents never studied film, never played a night game, didn’t have advance scouts, and sometimes even threw ball games. Bonds’s era…well, you get the point.

Arguing that baseball eras get progressively more and more difficult to dominate may not be a hard argument to make. The point, though, is to ask not whose era was the more difficult to dominate, but to what extent does that domination-difficulty have on our thinking of who is the greatest player of all time between the two eras.

Is 25 points of adjusted OPS, plus Ruth’s pitching, plus a slight edge for Ruth’s post-seasons larger than Bonds’s superior defense and an adjustment for the difference in eras? What about 9 points of EqA? If so, we have to continue to conclude that Ruth is the greatest player between the two; else, it’s Bonds.

The truly unfortunate thing for the sabermetrician is that we have, to my knowledge, no objective measure of era comparison. It’s a whole lot of guesswork. We know the extent to which Bonds dominated the 90s and 2000s, and the same for Ruth in his era; we just can’t list all the ways the two eras were different, plus assume the extent to which either player would dominate in the other’s era.

How dare a sabermetrician use his gut, or guesswork, or subjectivism, but it’s all we have. Personally, I just can’t imagine that the addition of minority players, league-wide year-round physical conditioning, sliders, advance opponent studies, the (assumed) absence of game fixing, and ultra-sophisticated measures for getting the greatest baseball players in the entire world to play in one league can’t bridge the gap I detailed two paragraphs ago.

Therefore, I’m left with one conclusion to make if we equalize for either steroids’ usage or their immorality: Barry Bonds’s career output is the greatest ever.