FUN WITH NUMBERSI believe you can tell a lot from numbers, but one thing I'm pretty sure you can't tell from home run totals alone is who uses steroids. There's just too many things that can account for variation, both on the individual player level (injuries, ball parks, etc) and on the wider scale (year-to-year variations in league averages in HR and offensive production, etc).
First, a small correction -- you wrote: "At age 34, Bonds missed 1/3 of that season's games and finished the year with his 4th consecutive year of decreasing homeruns." Here are Bonds' HR totals:
| Year | Age | HR |
| 1995 | 30 | 33 |
| 1996 | 31 | 42 |
| 1997 | 32 | 40 |
| 1998 | 33 | 37 |
| 1999 | 34 | 34 |
Ending at age 34, Bonds had only 3 consecutive years of declining HR, not 4. And as you point out, the last of those he missed 1/3 of the season, so it's not quite fair to call 1999 (age 34) a "decline" (since he probably would have hit over 40 had he played the whole year). Look at it another way...
You cite the years 1997-1999 as evidence of Bonds' decline (3 straight years of declining HR totals). But the last of those years (1999), he posted his highest SLG% since 1994. In fact from 1997-1999, his SLG%
increased every year. His HR totals may have been down, but his overall power production was on the upswing.
If you want to look at HR totals, take a look at the "Translated Statistics" section of Bonds' page at Baseball Prospectus (
www.baseballprospectus.com/dt/bondsba01.shtml). These translated stats are "normalized" allowing you to more efficiently compare stats from year-to-year or player-to-player. They put everyone on equal footing, eliminating the effects of ballparks and league/era variations (live ball vs dead ball, etc). Bonds' career straddles periods of low offensive production (early and mid 1990s) and the offensive explosion of the late 90s and early 2000s. The translated stats remove the effects of these different hitting environments.
Using the translated stats, you can see Bonds hit a translated equivalent of 335 HR in the last seven years, between ages 33 and 39, or 47.8 HR per year. Compare that to the seven previous years in his career (ages 26-32) - Bonds hit a translated 320 HR, an average of 45.7 per year. So once you account for differences in ballparks and juiced balls, etc., Bonds averaged only 2 more HR in the later portion of his career than in the earlier. It's true that you'd probably expect a player to decline in the later years rather than hold steady or improve a slight bit, but the difference between early Bonds and later Bonds isn't as stark as the raw HR totals would indicate -- the differences in run-scoring in baseball as a whole accounts for some of the difference.
Of course, you could also assert that this just proves Bonds has been using steroids pretty much his entire career rather than just the last 4-5. And you may be right. Who knows?
Anyway, focusing on recent years, regardless of what the HR totals (translated or untranslated) show, it's clear Bonds jumped to another level power-wise at age 36 -- his
translated SLG% jumped nearly .200.
*ACTIVATE ABSURD SPECULATION BOOSTER*
Is this the result of steroids or of Bonds swinging for the downs on every hittable pitch? His walks increased by an incredible 68% that year (2001). Pitchers were pitching around him more and more, and maybe Bonds figured he should go for broke every chance he got, much like people have speculated about Frank Thomas's power production this year. They say since Frank knew he couldn't run the bases well, he swung for the fences every time up so he could trot around rather than run station-to-station, and this resulted in his incredible HR rate.
*DEACTIVATE ABSURD SPECULATION BOOSTER*
That of course, is just silly speculation. In my original post, I acknowledged that it was likely Bonds used steroids, but what I don't know is what effect they've had. I also don't know how many other players (hitters and pitchers) have used them, so it's impossible to set a baseline for performance during the past 10 years. We have little clue who was using what and when, and we have even less of a clue exactly what effect whatever they were using had on their performance. Would you be willing to cut Bonds some slack if he had faced Juan Rincon (confirmed steroid user) every time up? You can't single out certain players during an era of corruption just because they were more successful than others. And you've got to penalize Bernard Gilkey and anyone else who had Lasix surgery to improve their eyesight so they could do better than their contemoporaries.
When it comes to steroids, either you've got to toss out the past 10 years altogether, or just work with what we do know. And what we do know is that Bonds is and always was a great player.
Here's the thing - Bonds was considered a superstar and destined to be among the all-time greats long before his supposed steroid-aided jump in power at age 35 or 36 (depending on which numbers you chose to look at). You can see this clearly in the comments about Bonds in the annual Baseball Prospectus books:
- Following the 1995 season (age 30), BP indicated Bonds had the potential to do incredible things: "Bonds is the only active left fielder who can still have a crack at being the best ever at his position. Barring catastrophic injuries, I expect him to pass Henderson and Musial in total value, and he's still got a crack at Williams, thanks to the wars. Hits for a high average, draws a ton of walks, has great power, and is fantastic defensively."
- After the next year, 1996 (age 31 - the first of Rich's "declining" years), BP saw the complete opposite of an impending decline: "Insanely great... In career value, he has passed all left fielders except Williams, Musial and Henderson. He’ll pass Henderson in about two years, Musial in three and Williams in seven. By the time his career ends, he will displace Ted Williams in those “best player ever” discussions between Ruth and Wagner. Believe it or not, Bonds is still underrated."
- For the next few years, BP's comments focused mostly on San Francisco's lack of appreciation for Bonds, so there's a lot of noise in their comments. But it's clear they still were predicting great things for him, not the typical decline. They called his 1997 season (the second of the "declining" years "MVP-calibre", and the next year they labeled him "The greatest San Francisco Giant since his godfather, Willie Mays."
- After 1999, the last of Rich's "declining" years, they wrote: "He had elbow surgery early in the season, then knee surgery at the end of the campaign. Bonds came back too soon from the first injury and hit .227 in his first six weeks back, resulting in his lowest batting average in 10 years. Still, he had his highest slugging percentage since 1994 and the rest of his game was intact. Bonds is the greatest Giant since Willie Mays."
Bonds is an incredible player, and he was an incredible player - far above his contemporaries - long before the effect of steroids. Here's a guy who, before his career was even half over, was considered to have a realistic chance of being the greatest LF of all time and to figure prominently in discussions of the greatest single player of all time.
Back in the mid-90s they were saying Bonds could have a chance to be the best that ever was. Those comments were made looking just at what he did in the
first 10 years of his career, long before the steroids supposedly kicked in.
Did Bonds use steroids? Sure, probably. Did they increase his power/offensive production, or at a minimum, allow him to maintain his performance later in his career? Maybe.
But I've also got to give Bonds credit for the non-steroid portion of Bonds. And even after you remove the effect of steroids (impossible as that may be to define), you're left with a no-doubt Hall of Famer and one of the greatest players ever.
How often do you wish you could have seen Ruth or Williams or Aaron or Mays in their prime? Over the past 20 years, I've had the chance to witness the exploits of one of the all-time greats on a nearly daily basis, and I'm going to appreciate that and take advantage of it.
