Steroids, in theory, can help an athlete in three ways:
First, they apparently aid in recovery and in maintaining health, boosting performance by allowing an athlete to spend more time on the field. In this sense, steroids are like cortisone shots (which is, in fact, a steroid) or Tylenol with the significant addition of being illegal. This is their least objectionable facet: nearly everyone of likes the idea of having the best players on the field, and a “fix” for Koufax’s elbow, Mantle’s knees, or Nomar’s wrist is something that most baseball fans would approve of.
The problem lies in the line between a “fix” and something that benefits a player. The second benefit of steroids is that they both allow players to add muscle mass more easily and to maintain facets of their athletic performance for a longer period of time. (I would guess that steroids do not benefit flexibility, coordination, or speed, but their ability to allegedly remove nagging injuries would likely do so, as anyone who has tried to run on a wonky ankle would know.) In this sense, steroids are just the poorly regarded cousin of modern medicine more generally: Mays and Aaron didn’t have the supplements, or the advances in nutrition, or the knowledge of training regimens that we have today. All of these things allow players to become “better” than a player who doesn’t use them. In basketball, advances in medicine, equipment, and nutrition have allowed KG, Kobe, and Nash to continue playing beyond the point where would have expected them to break down.
The difference between these advances is that steroids are, again, illegal. This creates three issues when comparing steroids to other advances. First, there is the moral issue involved. Theoretically, barring a player from the Hall wouldn’t be that dissimilar from banning a player for using a spitball or because he, say, whipped his kids or was violent towards his wife. Second, and more important, at least from my view, is the issue of access. Because steroids are / were illegal and expensive, only already semi-established players with the correct connections could afford and access them, giving a certain class of players concrete advantages over their competitors. Of course, this advantage is not the same as that held by whites over blacks before 1946, but that’s a slightly different issue. Third, and stemming from the limited access issue, is that most advances in sports medicine and preparation “raise all boats,” as it were: because everyone has access to the same technology, hitters and pitchers and fielders will all get better relatively equally, allowing us to compare all players from different eras because the baseline hitter in 2011, while likely better than the baseline hitter in 1946, is at the same level relative to the pitchers of 2011 as the hitter of 1946 was to the pitchers of 1946.[1]
Finally, steroids, according to some, allow players to go play above their “true” talent level. Following this idea, Barry Bond and Mark McGwire were both totally incapable of hitting over 70 home runs “legally,” even if they were totally healthy and had trained like mad in order to do so. I find this idea suspicious for a couple reasons: first, muscles are muscles. Steroids might help them develop, but they won’t replace a player’s legs with those of a cheetah or his arms with springs and steel cables. Second, I’m not sure what “true talent level” means: is Willie May’s true talent level the .345/.411/.667 that he hit in 1954, or is it his .302/.384/.557 career line? Had he hit like he did in 1954 in 1971, we would probably say that he was “over-performing” for age 40. But I’m not sure that, had Mays hit .370/.450./.700 in 1955 that we could say the same; while those numbers would have been his best ever, they wouldn’t have been so far out of line with expectations to be considered to be an “over-performance” of his peak.
(Note: Joe Posnanski has recently argued along similar lines to what follows: that Bonds was a Hall of Famer before 1998. I apologize if I have borrowed any ideas.)
Let’s return to Bonds. The most common narrative for Bonds is that he started “juicing” after 1998, because it looked like his career was in decline and because no one was paying attention to how great he was. I don’t really care about the motivations, to be honest, I just want to look at the part of his career where he has been assumed to be clean. (I should also point out that Bonds has never failed a test, but at this point that isn’t going to persuade anyone.) In any case, Barry Bonds from 1986 (when he played only 113 games at age 21) to 1997, with rank in NL that year in parentheses:
| Year | BA | OBP | SLG | OPS | HR |
| 1986 | .233 | .330 | .416 | .746 | 16 |
| 1987 | 0.261 | 0.329 | 0.492 | 0.821 | 25 |
| 1988 | 0.283 | 0.368 (7) | 0.491 (7) | 0.859 (6) | 24 (9) |
| 1989 | 0.248 | 0.351 | 0.426 | 0.777 | 19 |
| 1990 | 0.301 | 0.406 (4) | 0.565 (1) | 0.970 (1) | 33 (4) |
| 1991 | 0.292 | 0.410 (1) | 0.514 (4) | 0.924 (1) | 25 |
| 1992 | 0.311 (7) | 0.456 (1) | 0.624 (1) | 1.080 (1) | 34 (2) |
| 1993 | 0.336 (4) | 0.458 (1) | 0.677 (1) | 1.136 (1) | 46 (1) |
| 1994 | 0.312 | 0.426 (5) | 0.647 (3) | 1.073 (3) | 37 (3) |
| 1995 | 0.294 | 0.431 (1) | 0.577 (5) | 1.009 (1) | 33 (4) |
| 1996 | 0.308 | 0.461 (2) | 0.615 (4) | 1.076 (2) | 42 (2) |
| 1997 | 0.291 | 0.446 (2) | 0.585 (6) | 1.031 (3) | 40 (4) |
So we have a ten year period where Bonds was one of the best players at getting on base and at hitting for power; he also stole 417 bases during this time and won seven gold gloves. His counting numbers are a little small for the hall, but they’re not that small. For comparison, Bonds’ 1986-1997 gives him a line of .288/.408/.551 with 374 home runs. Jim Rice, for his career, put together a .298/.352/.502 line with 382 home runs and about a dozen more double than Bonds. I don’t like using Rice as a baseline for getting into the Hall, but it is worth pointing out that Bonds, who derived a lot of value from his defense and base-running, was a better offensive player than Rice, who was almost entirely an offensive player, through just the first twelve years of his career.
To continue the comparison, Bond’s offensive peak was much higher: Rice cannot claim to have spent eight straight years as one of the best five offensive players in their league nor four years as the undisputed number one (in fact, other than the old Barry Bonds, can you think of anyone else besides young Barry Bonds who could make that claim since Mantle retired?) Bonds’ first peak is worth spending more time on. Since four year peaks are rather rare, we’ll first compare Bonds in 1993 to a couple other exceptional offensive years from great players since 1960:
| Year | Name | G | BA | OBP | SLG | OPS | HR | R | RBI |
| 1993 | Bonds | 159 | 0.336 | 0.458 | 0.677 | 1.136 | 46 | 129 | 123 |
| 1990 | Henderson | 136 | 0.325 | 0.439 | 0.577 | 1.016 | 28 | 119 | 61 |
| 1980 | Brett | 117 | 0.390 | 0.454 | 0.664 | 1.118 | 24 | 87 | 118 |
| 1976 | Morgan | 141 | 0.320 | 0.444 | 0.576 | 1.020 | 27 | 113 | 111 |
| 1969 | McCovey | 149 | 0.320 | 0.453 | 0.656 | 1.108 | 45 | 101 | 126 |
| 1967 | Yastrzemski | 161 | 0.326 | 0.418 | 0.622 | 1.040 | 44 | 112 | 121 |
| 1966 | F. Robinson | 155 | 0.316 | 0.410 | 0.637 | 1.047 | 49 | 122 | 122 |
| 1965 | Mays | 157 | 0.317 | 0.398 | 0.645 | 1.043 | 52 | 118 | 112 |
| 1963 | Aaron | 161 | 0.319 | 0.391 | 0.586 | 0.977 | 44 | 121 | 130 |
| 1961 | Mantle | 153 | 0.317 | 0.448 | 0.687 | 1.135 | 54 | 131 | 128 |
Now, every one of these seasons is great: there’s Yaz’s magical 1967; the year George Brett almost hit .400; one of the two years in which Joe Morgan hit about as well as the rest of the league combined; and exceptional seasons from five guys in anybody’s top ten outfielders ever list. By my estimation, these are the ten best pure offensive seasons between 1960 and 1993 without putting any one name up there twice (no one would have more than two). And Bonds’s 1993 is pretty clearly, in my mind, the best one since Mantle’s 1961 season: his batting average is higher than everyone’s but Brett’s, his OBP is tops, and he slugged better than everyone but Mantle. Even if you don’t accept that it is the best offensive season in thirty years, Bonds’ 1993 is certainly in the discussion, and that alone gives him pretty elite status.
But one great season does not a Hall of Famer make (according the Koufax corollary, it takes at least four). So I went back and collected all the (qualifying) seasons in which players put together a wRC+ of greater than 180 (this was an entirely arbitrary number, but it makes about as much sense as any other arbitrary number). For those of you unfamiliar with wRC+, it stands for weighted Runs Created +, and is based off of wOBA, or weighted On Base Average. wOBA takes each offensive event and assigns it a value based on historical likelihood of that event to create a run for your team. By “averaging” those situations where a player hits a single with a runner on third and those in which he hits one with no one on and two outs, you get a context neutral approximation of how well a player did in one number. wRC+ takes that number and adjusts it to how hitter friendly a park is and how well the league is hitting generally. Basically, wRC+ calculates how much better than the average hitter a player hit; since 100 is average, 180 is 80% better than average. Here’s the list between 1960 and 1997, sorted descending by wRC+:
| 1994 White Sox | Frank Thomas | 204 | 0.497 |
| 1990 As | Rickey Henderson | 204 | 0.467 |
| 1992 Pirates | Barry Bonds | 203 | 0.469 |
| 1980 Royals | George Brett | 200 | 0.479 |
| 1972 White Sox | Dick Allen | 200 | 0.453 |
| 1961 Yankees | Mickey Mantle | 199 | 0.482 |
| 1981 Phillies | Mike Schmidt | 199 | 0.470 |
| 1976 Reds | Joe Morgan | 197 | 0.473 |
| 1966 Orioles | Frank Robinson | 196 | 0.447 |
| 1962 Yankees | Mickey Mantle | 196 | 0.477 |
| 1969 Giants | Willie McCovie | 195 | 0.467 |
| 1961 Tigers | Norm Cash | 194 | 0.489 |
| 1967 Red Sox | Carl Yazstremski | 194 | 0.454 |
| 1993 Giants | Barry Bonds | 193 | 0.469 |
| 1971 Braves | Hank Aaron | 190 | 0.466 |
| 1975 Reds | Joe Morgan | 188 | 0.463 |
| 1965 Giants | Willie Mays | 187 | 0.448 |
| 1973 Pirates | Willie Stargel | 186 | 0.445 |
| 1963 Braves | Hank Aaron | 185 | 0.429 |
| 1996 Giants | Barry Bonds | 184 | 0.454 |
| 1967 Orioles | Frank Robinson | 184 | 0.426 |
| 1989 Giants | Kevin Mitchell | 183 | 0.428 |
| 1971 Pirates | Willie Stargel | 181 | 0.444 |
| 1970 Red Sox | Carl Yazstremski | 180 | 0.455 |
| 1961 Orioles | Jim Gentile | 180 | 0.454 |
Now, you’ll notice that this makes Bonds’ 1993 seem a little worse (it doesn’t account for games played, and offense was starting its skyrocket in 1993), but his 1992 was, relative to the league, even better. You’ll also notice that he’s the only person on the list who appears three times.[2] Of the 25 best offensive seasons between 1961 and 1997 then, Bonds is the only person to have three. That’s not to say that he was better in the first twelve years of his career than Yaz or Mike Schmidt or Joe Morgan was; it is to say that his peak was on that level, though, with the other all-time greats in the latter half of the twentieth century.
To recap: Barry Bonds, by twelve years into his career, had achieved a stretch of offensive dominance on or above the level of most of Hall of Fame players; he had the counting and slash stats of a Hall of Fame-r; he was a great base stealer and an even better defender, with seven gold gloves; and, for the more statistically inclined out there, he already had 92.1 Wins Above Replacement (the most commonly cited cutoff for the Hall of Fame is ~60). He was approaching a milestone (he would reach it in 1998, to relative quiet while McGwire and Sosa did the much less impressive feat of hit home runs) that no one else has ever reached before or since: accumulating 400 steals and 400 home runs. He was already, in all respects, a Hall of Fame-caliber player and, on all accounts, wildly underappreciated.
Which is to say that even without the steroid years of his career, without the records and the World Series and the massive head, Bonds should be inducted into the Hall of Fame. It is also to say that he was a singular player, one of the best ever seen, and that there isn’t really a good way to predict how a game his would have aged, a thought I’ll return to with my next post.
[1] As a side note, I don’t actually think that this is true. I find it much more likely that these advances move in waves as new pitches become vogue and as some advances benefit pitchers more than hitters and vice-versa. There can also be general talent disparities between the two groups, but the point generally stands: advances in medicine and knowledge will not make a player better relative to their peers..
[2] The year cut off is particularly unfair to Mays and Mantle, the latter of whom would dominate the list if we went back to 1946.
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