Monday, January 08, 2007

Facing the Tragic But Inevitable: Bonds' Home Run Chase

Since Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in the 2001 season, I have had this sinking, vomit-like feeling in the pit of my stomach that Bonds, the hated Giant, alleged steroid user and baseball rule-breaker, a man with incredible hubris and unlikable personality, would someday break the all-time home run record.

Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs sits atop the list, and when you read the story of the racial slurs and death threats he encountered along the way, it makes his quiet reserve and role-model work ethic almost godlike. To have Bonds eclipse this record just seems like a moral wrong.

But there was always hope. Back in the middle of the 2003 season, while Bonds was en route to 45 home runs, ESPN’s Jayson Stark wrote this article, which always gave me hope that Bonds would lose steam, or his body would break down, or managers and pitchers would just walk him all the time. Wrote Stark:

Because as amazing as Barry is at turning around a fastball, there's one high hard one even he can't turn around. And that's the calendar that keeps coming at him, 100 miles an hour, no matter how superhuman he might look right now.

That calendar knows that Bonds just turned 39 years old. And we all know what number comes next. So for Bonds to keep on cranking out those home runs at the same rate he has for the last three years -- one every 7.67 at-bats, one every 2½ games, upwards of 55 a season -- would defy every precedent, every page in the baseball history books, every time-established limit on human performance by men his age….

Now, should we assume Barry is going to keep cranking out 40 or 50 home runs a year, clear into his 40s? Well, we'll grant you he's as great a hitter than almost anyone who ever played. But remember this: Nobody else ever has….

OK, let's keep going. Most home runs by a 41-year-old: 29, by Ted Williams in 1961. Most by a 42-year-old: 18, by Carlton Fisk, in 1990. Most by a 43-year-old: 18, also by Fisk, in 1991. And after that, it isn't even worth counting anymore.

So to break this record, Bonds is going to need to keep churning out historic, or nearly historic seasons, for a man his age every year -- at least for three years, and, if he suffers any kind of major injury, possibly for a year or two or three after that.

Oh, maybe he will. He's done a heck of a job of making age seem irrelevant in his upper 30s. But it's a lot to assume.

Stark’s column always gave me the glimmer of hope that the baseball gods would smite Bonds and his home run chase. Alas, 3½ seasons, armored plating for his elbow, and a weak Giants’ batting order later, Bonds has hit around 80 of those 105 home runs he needed, and now sits only 22 home runs away from the all-time record.

Stark was right in citing the few players who continued to be productive for power late in their careers. That data seems to indicate Bonds was poised for a fall-off.

The list of most home runs hit in a season, by age of player:

Age Player Home Runs
30 Sammy Sosa 63
31 Jim Thome 52
32 Sammy Sosa 64
33 Mark McGwire 58
34 Mark McGwire 70
35 Mark McGwire 65
36 Barry Bonds 73
37 Hank Aaron 47
38 Barry Bonds 45
39 Barry Bonds 45
40 Darrell Evans 34
41 Ted Williams 29
42 Carlton Fisk 18
43 Carlton Fisk 18
44 Julio Franco 5
45 Julio Franco 6
46 Julio Franco 9
47 Julio Franco 2

What the data doesn’t reflect, though, is how athletes can maintain their physical gifts a lot longer than they used to be able to. Bonds has narrowed the gap by exceeding, or coming close to exceeding, the home-runs-by-age mark for every year except 2005, when he was 40 and spent most of the year injured. In 2005, Bonds was 41 and hit 26, just three homers off Ted Williams’ mark of 29.

In fact, if you look at the “shape of the curve” for the top ten all-time home run leaders (I’ve bolded Aaron in dark blue, Bonds in orange, Ruth in red, and Griffey (I used him instead of Reggie Jackson, with whom he shares the #10 slot, since I assume he will knock Reggie out), the only other truly active player, in green),…well, it’s kind of a mess. But you can see that not only has Bonds peaked higher and later than all the other power hitters, his decline is precipitous mostly due to his injury year in 2005. Take that point out and he’s still chugging along at a 10-20 homers-per-season clip, at worst.

So the next question is, when will Bonds do it? If Bonds slightly outperforms Carlton Fisk’s 18 home runs at age 42, Bonds breaks the record this year.

If not in 2007, it’s almost a certainty that he will break it in 2008. Fisk ended up with 40 more home runs from age 42 onward, across four more seasons of play. Carl Yastrzemski had 16 home runs at age 42 and ten home runs at age 43, to total 26 home runs from age 42 onward. And Father Time, Julio Franco (not to be confused with 2006 Rent-A-Dodger Julio Lugo), hit three home runs at age 42, followed by seasons of six, five, six, nine, and two—totaling 31 home runs from age 42 onward. And Franco is still going—slower, but going—and he doesn’t have half the armor plating that Bonds wields.

Bonds only needs 22 home runs to break Hank Aaron’s record. There is always the threat of injuries, the lack of any other potent bats in the 2007 Giants lineup, and the pitchers parks in which Bonds plays (all points that Fox Sports talking head Dayn Perry brings up in his article). None of those factors stopped Bonds last season, however. I have now resigned myself to the fact that it will happen, and it will be a sad day for Dodgers fans as well as for baseball fans in general.

At least, on that point, Stark had it wrong:

If Bonds does get to Aaron's doorstep, we would jump on the next plane any place to witness his chase. It would be that great a story. But let's just say we haven't called our travel agent yet, because take our word for it: The Road to Aaron is a lot longer than it may look from here.

If the ratings from Bonds’ ESPN reality show are any indication, maybe it isn’t that big a story after all. Maybe it will be big in the record books, but nowhere else. And if a record falls in the record books but no one tunes into see it, does it really fall?

5 comments:

Orel said...

It's not all bad news for Barry; in this ESPN.com poll of Hall of Fame voters, more said they would have voted for an eligible Bonds this year (44.4%) than for Mark McGwire (26.8%).

Could it be that McGwire, who escaped the brunt of steroid scrutiny, is finally paying the price? If so, look for an anti-Bonds backlash (forelash?), i.e., more positive attention surrounding home run #756.

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