As a kid, I devoured baseball history. When I was about six, my dad bought me the early 1990s version of The Baseball Chronicle, a year-by-year account of the history of the game from 1900 onwards. I read the book like a novel; I learned the World Series winners by heart and memorized details about my favorite Pirate teams throughout history. I read about all of the other giants of the game, from Ed Delahanty and Ty Cobb to great players like George Brett, whose careers I could watch wind down. I spent hours with my grandfather in his basement, playing game after game with a huge stack of Cadaco All-Star Baseball discs accumulated both through his childhood and the childhoods of my dad and uncles. He would tell me stories about Bob Feller and Willie Mays and the great Yankee teams of the ’40s and ’50s and I’d listen with rapt attention. My dad and uncles would tell stories about Al Kaline, Roberto Clemente, Mike Schmidt, and Willie Stargell while I sat, soaking in the stories like a sponge.
Part of what I learned then was that the Hall of Fame was what divided the good players from the great ones. Dave Parker was a very good player for the Pirates in the late ’70s, my dad would say. That they thought that maybe he could be the team’s next Clemente, but in the end he didn’t take care of himself and he never sustained that peak of the late ’70s and because of that, he could never be on the same level as guys like Roberto or Pops. For me, the Hall of Fame was always what separated the All-Stars from the legends.
It was easy as a kid to know which of the players in the game was going to join those legends. On the 1990-1992 Pirate teams that taught me how to love baseball, Andy Van Slyke may have been my favorite player for his ridiculous catches and goofy antics, but I always knew Barry Bonds was the best player on that team or any other. In 1990, the first baseball season that I have any real memories of, Bonds hit 33 homers and stole 52 bases. Even without real context (I was five, my baseball-history-devouring sessions were a couple years away; I was still on Dr. Seuss for primary reading material at this point), I knew that was amazing. I didn’t know anything about on base percentage then, but I knew that Bonds’ eye at the plate was unmatched.
Of course, Bonds made a bad throw from left field and left Pittsburgh immediately after that and I’ve still never been able to fully forgive. That’s part of the beauty of sports; we carry grudges forever because we can’t in real life. Bonds went to San Francisco and got even better and I knew it, but I still booed him and rooted against him. The Giants’ collapse in 2002 is one of my favorite World Series, just because it kept Bonds from winning a ring and eclipsing his post-season failings as a Pirate. Still, I can’t deny the things he accomplished in San Francisco. His 1993 season, well before anyone thinks he started juicing, was one for the ages. He hit .336/.458/.677 and hit 46 homers in Candlestick Park, a pronounced pitcher’s park. In 1992 and 1993, his OPS+ was over 200 in both seasons. That’s two more times than Albert Pujols has topped 200. From 1994-1997, he hit .301/.443/.603. He averaged 44 homers and an OPS+ of 177. From 1990 through 1997, Baseball-Reference says he racked up 72 wins above replacement, one more than Pujols has in the last eight seasons.
We all know what happened with Bonds in/around/after 1998. The best and most prideful player of the generation saw lesser players passing him and did what he thought he needed to to do catch up. Was taking steroids wrong? Of course. Was he the only player that did it? Of course not. And it goes without saying that (probably) lying about it to federal investigators and a grand jury only made things worse. But who else took steroids and hit 73 home runs in a season? Who else slugged .863 in a year or got on base at a .559 pace over three seasons? No one. Bonds was still doing things that only he could do.
Baseball fans my age have been fortunate to see some incredible careers over the last 20+ seasons. Among position players alone, we’ve got Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, and Albert Pujols. These guys are some of the best hitters in the history of the game. Best in terms of historical performance, best in terms of performance relative to their positions and peers, just the best by any reasonable standard. But if I’m ever lucky enough to have a son, daughter, niece, or nephew as interested in baseball as I was as a kid, Barry Bonds is the player I’m going to tell them was the best that I’ve ever seen. The best without steroids, the best with steroids, the player that inspired more awe and anger in me than every other baseball player of the last 20 years combined.
Sure, this hypothetical future kid and I will talk about steroids and about whether Bonds’ 762 is as impressive as Aaron’s 755 and why cheating is wrong and how baseball sold its soul to the needle to win back the fans that they scared off in 1994. In the end, though, if I can’t say that Barry Bonds is a Hall of Famer, I don’t know how the Hall of Fame can ever mean as much to future generations of young baseball fans as it did to me when I was a kid.
