Wipeout
by Andy Behrens
Barry.
American pop culture is littered with Barrys of distinction — Manilow, Williams, White, et al. — despite the name's relative disuse. But no specific Barry has excited us enough to achieve single-name celebrity status, not even sports' pre-eminent Barry, the greatest ballplayer of his era: Barry Lamar Bonds.
Six hundred and forty-six home runs, 500 stolen bases, a career OPS of 1.031. Yet when we hear the name "Barry," we think of ... what? Marion Barry maybe, or Crunch Berries. Unless we live in the San Francisco Bay area, where Bonds and his first-place Giants are on TV nearly every night, we don't reflexively think of Bonds and his explosive swing, his colossal home run off Troy Percival in last year's World Series, his defensive genius, his slow, menacing waggle in the batter's box.
There's no magic in the name. It's no Jesus, no Oprah, no...
Babe.
That's a name that evokes only one image, with apologies to Winkelman, the Fabulous Sports Babe, a certain porcine children's movie icon and that rank Styx song. George Herman "Babe" Ruth, the fleshy slugger whose stats seem as aberrant and impossible today as they did in 1920 when he mashed 54 home runs to lead the American League. The same year, Cy Williams led the National League with 15. Ruth was illogically good, and the deader he gets, the better he gets. He's entombed in social studies texts. He died 55 years ago, and he's still endorsing products.
If Babe Ruth represented what every man aspired to be at the height of the Jazz Age — a free-spending, fun-loving glutton and a product of his own stupid American talent — Bonds represents the worst of what we are right now — solipsistic, disconnected, disinterested and selfish.
That's the caricature of Bonds, anyway. But he's complicated. In comments for which he's been thoroughly derided, Bonds recently linked himself to Ruth while considering the pursuit of 755, Hank Aaron's career home run record:
"Willie's number is always the one that I've strived for," Bonds said during the All-Star break of his godfather, Willie Mays. "And if it does happen, the only number I care about is Babe Ruth's. Because as a left-handed hitter, I wiped him out. That's it. And in the baseball world, Babe Ruth's everything, right? I got his slugging percentage and I'll take his home runs and that's it. Don't talk about him no more."
Columnists nailed Bonds for the obvious subtext. That is, Bonds wants to erase Babe Ruth: White Icon, not Babe Ruth the left-handed hitter. Barry was maligned for his blaspheming, for his arrogance and for dragging racial nuance into the fun and presumably easy binary question: Who's better, Babe or Barry? Sports writers have answered with a collective "Duh." The Babe's the best, fer Chrissakes. He's the biggest, best hittinest, hard drinkinest slugger there ever was.
The opinion is based largely on creaky sentimental bullshit, dubious logic and anti-Bonds hostility. In the end, Bonds vs. Ruth is a silly and unwinnable argument. But in the end — the real end, when baseball is only played in New York and relegated to tape-delayed broadcasts following the local news — Barry Bonds will have all the numbers, and there really won't be anything to discuss. For now, Bonds and Ruth are difficult to compare for precisely the reason Barry wants to eclipse Ruth's records: The Babe's stats are a sham, as are all pre-integration baseball stats. Barry's dead-on right.
Not even the more byzantine, sabermetric attempts at objective statistical analysis can overcome the problem of segregation in baseball, which ostensibly ended with Jackie Robinson's 1947 major-league debut but endured in many cities for years to come. Baseball stat über-guru Bill James developed win shares, a dense and elegant method of assessing true player value across leagues and eras. The all-time Major League top 10 win shares list features six players who accumulated stats in the dead ball era — Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Cy Young, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins — and another, Stan Musial, who had already won six batting titles before his own team integrated. The other three players among the career top 10 — Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Bonds — are black.
Maybe it's entirely true that six of baseball's 10 greatest players were active in 1915. The alternative is this: Segregation allowed a few talented white players to achieve absurd and artificial statistical dominance, the kind of numbers that wouldn't have been possible with fair, integrated, plenary competition. (Undeniably, Bill James gets the race problem. He's attempted to slot Negro League players into an all-time top 100. Read about it here and here.)
Oddly enough, the suspicious-stats argument has been foisted against Barry. In a spirited defense of Ruth, ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski wrote, "Along with several stars, [Bonds] made us suspicious of steroid use. Until there is legitimate testing, we'll be left to wonder about his biceps and skull growing so late in life, about the rapid power explosion that dramatically elevated in his late thirties."
We'll take it on faith that Adrian has intimate knowledge of Barry's skull circumference. Bonds' "rapid power explosion," though, was essentially a fabulous season. In 2001, Barry clubbed 73 home runs while slugging .863, easily his best season and one of the most impressive that anyone in any sport has experienced. But everyone's got to have their best season sometime. It's not as though Barry had been slogging along for years with the 20-dinger crowd. Bonds has been metronomically consistent throughout his career. He hit 46 home runs in 1993 and he hit 46 home runs in 2002. The greatest difference between young Barry and latter-day Barry is the recent walking binge. He took a record 177 walks in 2001, then bettered it with 198 in 2002. If you believe Barry's on steroids, then you have to accept that, more than anything, the drugs have made him freakishly patient.
The card up the sleeve of Babe-philic columnists — the novelty that Barry can't claim — is Ruth's abbreviated career as a starting pitcher. The Contra Costa Times' Neil Hayes put it this way:
"What separates Ruth from Aaron, Mays and Bonds is that fact that he twice won 20 games as a pitcher, compiling 1.75 and 2.01 ERAs in 1916 and '17. Bonds may want to wait until he becomes a legitimate Cy Young candidate before he pops off. As far as all-around ability, Ruth is and was nonpareil."
That's just a big-ass lie. OK, not the stuff about Ruth being a swell pitcher during the early years of the Wilson administration, but this oft-repeated business about Ruth's unmatched all-around talents.
Here's a name: Martin Dihigo.
Here's another: Smokey Joe Williams.
Here's a third: Bullet Joe Rogan.
In Ruth's day, the Negro Leagues featured multiple athletes who excelled on the mound and at the plate. Hall of Famers Dihigo, Williams and Rogan were likely the best. In 1938 Dihigo led the Mexican League with a .387 batting average while posting an 18-2 record and a 0.90 ERA. Lore holds that Smokey Joe defeated Walter Johnson 1-0 in a 1917 exhibition game, and struck out 20 New York Giants in another; according to John Holway's "The Complete Book of Baseball's Negro Leagues," Williams also hit .474 for the New York Lincoln Giants that year. Playing for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1922, Bullet Joe Rogan went 20-11, leading the Negro League in victories; that year Rogan hit .439, popped 18 home runs and had 13 triples.
If you buy that the Babe's pitching prowess separates him from the collection of Bonds-style one-dimensional superstars, fine. But understand two things: 1) the Babe isn't nearly as alone as you thought, and 2) all the best players must be dead. If Ruth played in the modern era of extreme specialization — when Scott Eyre can rake in $725,000 a year for pitching to one batter every other day — he'd be an outfielder with DH aspirations.
If Barry played in Ruth's era, he'd be a rumor.
E-mail Andy Behrens at abehrens53 at hotmail dot com.
