![]() 4 on the all-time career list, with a 182 average OPS+.īut according to ZiPS, those cartoonish four seasons would have been replaced with 156, 144, 115 and 95 and his career OPS+ would have settled at 153, placing him tied for 30th.Īs for Clemens, ZiPS has a similarly deflating effect on his numbers if you predict beyond 1998, when it's believed he started using PEDs. In those four seasons, his OPS+ was 259, 268, 231 and 263 - giving him three of the five highest seasons ever, surpassed only by Negro Leagues legend Josh Gibson. 9, just ahead of Stan Musial.Īccording to OPS+, which measures a player's ability to get on base and hit for power and normalizes for the effect of various parks, Bonds was unquestionably one of the game's great players during the first half of his career, when he had seven consecutive seasons of 170 or higher.īut after he started PEDs, he became otherworldly, particularly once he connected with BALCO. For his career, ZiPS projects Bonds' WAR total at 128.7 - dropping him from No. And during the four-year BALCO stretch, instead of totaling 47.3, he would have been expected to total 14.2. Instead of 11.9 in 2004, ZiPS predicts Bonds with a WAR of 1.7. The ZiPS system projects a far different arc. But from 1999 on, he posted four seasons in double digits, including two above 12 and then 11.9 in 2004 - the year he turned 40. Before 1999, the year he started using PEDs, Bonds' highest WAR for a single season was 10.5, in 1993, and that was his only double-digit season. 2 on the all-time list, barely behind Babe Ruth and well ahead of his godfather, Willie Mays. an average replacement player.īonds, buoyed by an astronomical run during his steroid-fueled years, wound up with a career WAR of 164.4 (using FanGraphs data), placing him No. It basically estimates how many wins a player is worth to his team vs. The goal of WAR is to give the most complete sense of a player's value to his team, and it's perhaps the best piece of data to compare the greatness of one player to the next. While no stat says "Barry Bonds" more than the home run, WAR speaks in far more powerful ways. It's also worth noting that the projection suggests Bonds would have played one fewer season than he did. 15, below Manny Ramirez (well, that's another discussion) and above Mike Schmidt. And where he actually hit 209 homers during the four seasons (2001 to 2004) he used the BALCO concoction, he was projected to hit just 66 during those four years.Īccording to ZiPS, where should Bonds be on the all-time home run list? Rather than the king, with 762, the projection has him at 551 career homers - placing him at No. Instead of hitting 73 home runs in 2001, the ZiPS projection suggests Bonds would have hit only 23 that year, plus or minus a couple. Things look startlingly different in the Bonds/Clemens cases when analyzed this way: ESPN asked him to project Bonds' and Clemens' career stats from the season each is believed to have started using PEDs - 1999 for Bonds and 1998 for Clemens. In the simplest terms, the system (endorsed by MLB.com and explained here) uses past performance and trends on how performance degrades with age to predict a player's future performance. Meet baseball stats guru Dan Szymborski, the creator of the ZiPS projection system. Or, what about Clemens' remarkable 2004 season? That's when, in the year he turned 42, Clemens went 18-4, struck out 218 batters and posted a 2.98 ERA on the way to his seventh Cy Young Award. ![]() How many home runs would Bonds actually have hit in 2001? That's the first year he used a concoction of drugs obtained through the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) - and the season he demolished the single-season home run record by blasting 73. So we wondered: Just how much did their presumed drug use affect their career numbers? But enough voters have decided that the players' relationships with performance-enhancing drugs are disqualifying. and Randy Johnson.īy the numbers, both would have been first-ballot Hall of Famers Bonds for being among the greatest players to don a baseball uniform, and Clemens for a 24-year career that generated 354 wins and seven Cy Young Awards. If Bonds and Clemens don't get at least 75% of votes this time, they'll need election by a select committee to join legends like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Cy Young, let alone their own contemporaries, superstars like Ken Griffey Jr. It's their last of 10 years of eligibility with voters from the Baseball Writers' Association of America, and ballots are due by the end of this month. THIS IS IT for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the end of the road on the steroid-driven debate about their Baseball Hall of Fame worthiness. Not as great: Assessing Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens without the PED factor You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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