Cooperstown will surely call Bonds' name someday - The best baseball player ever

Now that Barry Bonds has broken Henry Aaron’s all-time home record, there are a couple of things which need to be talked about. He’ll with anywhere from 756 to 780 homers, and just might call it a career after this season. Whenever he retires, some people (but not “baseball people”) will ask if he belongs in the Hall of Fame because he’s been accused of using performance enhancing drugs. While he waits the required five years before he’s eligible to be considered, there will be a trickle, then a flood of “I once saw Barry” stories – all about baseball, none about steroids, and he will be elected on the first ballot.

Through most of his career, Bonds was the rarest of baseball specimens, a five-tool player: one who can run, field, throw, hit, and hit for power (for other examples, see Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Joe DiMaggio as well as future Hall of Famers Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez). And because the baseball season is 162 games long and he has played 22 seasons, there will be no shortage of stories featuring Barry displaying one of those five tools.

Fans in Pittsburgh will remember Barry’s first MVP season in 1990 when he carried the Pirates to the League Championship Series. Or 1991, when he finished second in MVP voting and carried the Pirates back to the LCS. Or 1992, his second MVP season, when he took the Pirates to the LCS for the third straight time. Of course, Giants fans (and Dodger fans) will remember 1993, the year Barry introduced himself to the National League West with 46 homers and his second consecutive MVP award. At that point, with three MVP’s in four years, Barry’s Hall of Fame ticket was punched. The list of 3-time MVP’s is short, with none since 1986, and they’re all in.

He was the best, most feared hitter in baseball and the highest paid player in the National League until 1998, when Gary Sheffield made $6 million more than Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa banished the bad memories of the strike-shortened 1994 season, one home run at a time.

The message from baseball was clear: we will not only pay for home runs, we will over-pay for them. Barry Bonds may be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. He realized that when the ball goes over the outfielders’ heads and into the stands, he doesn’t need speed on the basepaths. So he sacrificed one tool (baserunning) for another (power hitting) and built up his muscles in order to turn base hits into extra base hits, and turn extra base hits into home runs.

Did he use performance enhancing drugs to build up muscle mass? He is a professional athlete with access to the state-of-the-art in sports nutrition, of course he did. But more importantly, did he break any rules in the process? NO HE DID NOT. There was no prohibition on the use of performance enhancers at that time, as evidenced by the huge jar of androstendione in Mark McGwire’s locker during his post-game interviews in 1998. Barry Bonds simply recognized that the game of baseball was changing and that he needed to change with it. Was it cheating? Absolutely not. Hitting is a battle between the pitcher and the batter, and whatever substances Barry Bonds (and other hitters) used for the care and maintenance of their bodies, pitchers were also using. That’s a zero sum gain in my book. With the “steroid era” lasting from about 1997 to 2002, the only Bond’s stat which stands out is his record-breaking 73 home run season in 2001. And if steroids alone were enough, Jose Canseco wouldn’t be stuck on 462, he would have hit 38 more and would be in the Hall of Fame right now.

In the years before the “steroid era”, Barry Bonds won as many MVP’s (3) as any other player in baseball history. In the years since, he won more MVP’s (4) than any player in baseball history, bringing his total to a mind-boggling seven. By the time he retires, he’ll own the all-time home run record, the single-season home run record, he’ll be one of four players with 40 homers and 40 stolen bases in a season, the ONLY player with 400 homers and 400 stolen bases, the ONLY player with 500 homers and 500 stolen bases, the ONLY four-time, five-time, six-time, and seven-time MVP, and the greatest player in the history of the game.

And I, for one, will be grateful for the fact that I got to watch him play every day when I lived in San Francisco between 2003 and 2006 and have three summer’s worth of stories that start with, “I once saw Barry…”