- Joined
- Mar 28, 2024
Reflections on Barry Bonds
I'd been meaning to do a piece on Bonds for while and was reminded of it due to all of the recent tributes and adulation that he's been getting from the Giants. I also remember hearing that they were going to put up a statue for the guy. I wanted to do a little bit of a deep dive/reflection on different aspects of Bonds the player and Bonds the person.
The player
A common cope by Bonds apologists is the assertion that you could split his career into 2 halves and you would get 2 Hall of Famers. This is absolutely asinine, as the 2nd half of his career was obviously heavily aided by PED abuse.
I also reject the notion that his steroid abuse was "balanced out" by the fact that many pitchers were juicing as well. I also think that pitchers benefit from steroids more by being able to recover quicker from injuries and in-between starts. In contrast, a hitter is going to benefit in all kinds of ways from these steroids.
To give you an idea of how roided up to the fucking gills Barry was, his hat size grew 2 sizes, his jersey went from Size 42 to Size 52 and his shoe size went from 10.5 to 13. He gained 55 lbs. from his time in Pittsburgh. I have never, ever heard of some shit like this.
I would contend that while Bonds was already a stupendous player before steroids, the magnitude of his use (again, the head size increase, etc.) as well as perhaps the type of steroids that he was doing artificially put him in a completely different stratosphere. We have to essentially throw out his steroid year if we're doing a fair appraisal of the guy vs. all of the other great players who have played this game.
I've done quite a bit of number crunching and if you take the 11 year period between 1989 and 1999 (includes a healthy portion of his Giants career and also before the steroids started to kick in), he was basically a 35 homer / 35 steals per year guy slashing 0.296/0.425/0.587 with a OPS of 1.012 and a OPS+ of 174. He also generated an average of 8 WAR / year during this stretch and also won his 8 Golden Gloves.
In his prime, he was a 4 tool player and basically a much better version of Juan Soto (more power, much better fielder, much better baserunner although Soto has been more clutch in the playoffs).
Now if you add in his first 3 years before the 11 year prime above and also account for steady decline in his last 8 years (throwing out his steroid-influenced stats and replacing them with a more "natural" curve) post the prime, then I think he ends up with 600 + homers and a career WAR of around 110 or so. Again, these would be first ballot Hall of Fame numbers on their own so even adjusting for steroids there is no question that he had a Hall-worthy career.
One last point, Bonds was objectively a horrible player in the playoffs (other than 1 of the steroid years) and very likely caused the Pirates to miss out on going to the World Series with his repeated slumps and fuckups in the field (see below).
The person
I had always heard that that Bonds was known as an asshole off the field, but holy shit was I not prepared for how abjectly terrible a nigger he was and continues to be.
In college at Arizona, he once ran off the field in the middle of the game and caused a 10 minute delay because he had to go take a shit.
When he and his team-mates missed curfews, they were all expected to do running drills as punishment. Upon hearing this, Bonds told the team captain "Fuck you, I'm not doing shit". When Jim Brock, the Manager, heard about this he asked the team to vote on whether or not they wanted Bonds on the team.
If it wasn't for 2 idiots voting against there would have been a unanimous vote to kick him off the team. Brock didn't have the balls to do it (as he obviously should have done with such a majority being for it). Instead, Brock lowered his penalty to just a 10 mile run. Upon hearing this, Bobby Bonds apparently drove his truck onto the fucking diamond, parked it in front of the dugout and confronted Brock (mind you, this was during a closed practice). The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Early on in his Pirates career, even though he was playing exceptionally well, his team-mates absolutely hated him. A great example is as follows: Bonds got into a heated confrontation with Andy Van Slyke which resulted in a scuffle...normally you would expect team-mates to quickly break up the fight right?
Well...Van Slyke was pulled off of Bonds, but then 5-6 of his team-mates proceed to pummel the motherfucking shit out of Bonds. I have never, in my decades and decades of following sports heard of such a thing happening in a locker room.
He once shoved a pizza into a team-mate's face during a heated argument and during contract arbitration, Bonds tried to jump across the table and physically fight the Pirates' GM.
The infamous confrontation with Jim Leyland is absolutely hilarious in retrospect but really shows you who Bonds is.
Against the Braves that one year, it was Game 7 and the 9th inning. The Pirates were up 2 runs and when Van Slyke told Barry to play shallow, Bonds gave him the finger and refused. The result? A hit to Barry which scored the winning run because Bond's weak throw wasn't in time to get the runner at home plate.
In SF, he and Jeff Kent fought at least a half dozen times.
A longtime photographer for the Pirates, Pete Diana, had over the years given Barry tons of photos for free. There was an accident at the Pirates stadium where 2 members of the staff tragically died. Diana started a very nice effort to try and raise some money for the families: whenever opposing players would come to Pittsburgh, he would ask them to sign memorabilia which would then be auctioned off and the proceeds would be given to the families.
Pretty much every star player you can think of from that era signed a bunch of stuff. So then, the Giants come to town and Diana (who obviously knew Barry well) asked him to sign some stuff. Barry's response? "Fuck you, fuck them, I'm not signing shit".
Pete Diana then told Jeff Pearlman when interviewed, "I hope Barry Bonds dies". Jesus Christ.
The Giants enabled a lot of Bonds' nigger behavior. He had an entire wall of the locker room to himself, including a leather recliner and a flat screen TV in front of his chair. While everyone else had to use the team publicist, Bonds had his own 2 publicists. He had his own massage therapist and even his own photographer.
This is only a sampling of all the insane confrontations that he had with players and press. If we include his horrific behavior with the press then I'd have to make about 10 more posts of this length. He was objectively cruel and seemed almost sadistic in how he treated pretty much any member of the press. Jesus I haven't even gotten into how he used to beat his wife to a pulp (even when she was 8 months pregnant).
I'm also not going to go into the debacle that was his stint as the Marlins' hitting coach, but it just goes to show that even so many years after retiring, he was still the same old asshole. You guys can look it up, but it's all the typical uppity nigger shit: a necessity to get paid the most and getting unheard of perks, not doing shit to help players improve, clashing with other coaches and management...
Final thoughts
For so many years, all I had known was that Bonds had a terrible relationship with the press...after I started compiling all of the stories I was just shocked at how many of his team-mates hated him. I also had no idea about how cruel he was to basically everyone. If ever there has been a player in any sports league who was a detriment to his team from a leadership and example setting perspective, it was absolutely Bonds.
His stats make for a clear Hall of Fame case, however given how much of a negative influence he was, I really can't blame anyone for Bonds being left off of ballots (and this is even if he never took steroids). He's quite possibly the worst person who has ever played a sport professionally.
As I was writing this, I kept thinking about how the richest nigger neighborhoods have more crime than the most impoverished white towns in places like rural Appalachia or even your random trailer park which is half meth labs.
Whether it's some gang-banging porch monkey on a school bus beating up other kids, some hoodrat bitch fighting another heifer on a cruise or the son of a famous ball player who grew up in affluence and received every aspect of a proper upbringing, one noble truth remains: a nigger will always be a nigger.
They're the worst scum on the face of the planet and can only defile and destroy anything that they come in touch with.
In the film "48 hours", Nick Nolte's character remarks to Eddie Murphy's that "Class isn't something you buy. Look at you, you've got on a 500-dollar suit and you're still a low-life."
Sums up the career and life of Bonds rather nicely I'd say.
I'd been meaning to do a piece on Bonds for while and was reminded of it due to all of the recent tributes and adulation that he's been getting from the Giants. I also remember hearing that they were going to put up a statue for the guy. I wanted to do a little bit of a deep dive/reflection on different aspects of Bonds the player and Bonds the person.
The player
A common cope by Bonds apologists is the assertion that you could split his career into 2 halves and you would get 2 Hall of Famers. This is absolutely asinine, as the 2nd half of his career was obviously heavily aided by PED abuse.
I also reject the notion that his steroid abuse was "balanced out" by the fact that many pitchers were juicing as well. I also think that pitchers benefit from steroids more by being able to recover quicker from injuries and in-between starts. In contrast, a hitter is going to benefit in all kinds of ways from these steroids.
To give you an idea of how roided up to the fucking gills Barry was, his hat size grew 2 sizes, his jersey went from Size 42 to Size 52 and his shoe size went from 10.5 to 13. He gained 55 lbs. from his time in Pittsburgh. I have never, ever heard of some shit like this.
I would contend that while Bonds was already a stupendous player before steroids, the magnitude of his use (again, the head size increase, etc.) as well as perhaps the type of steroids that he was doing artificially put him in a completely different stratosphere. We have to essentially throw out his steroid year if we're doing a fair appraisal of the guy vs. all of the other great players who have played this game.
I've done quite a bit of number crunching and if you take the 11 year period between 1989 and 1999 (includes a healthy portion of his Giants career and also before the steroids started to kick in), he was basically a 35 homer / 35 steals per year guy slashing 0.296/0.425/0.587 with a OPS of 1.012 and a OPS+ of 174. He also generated an average of 8 WAR / year during this stretch and also won his 8 Golden Gloves.
In his prime, he was a 4 tool player and basically a much better version of Juan Soto (more power, much better fielder, much better baserunner although Soto has been more clutch in the playoffs).
Now if you add in his first 3 years before the 11 year prime above and also account for steady decline in his last 8 years (throwing out his steroid-influenced stats and replacing them with a more "natural" curve) post the prime, then I think he ends up with 600 + homers and a career WAR of around 110 or so. Again, these would be first ballot Hall of Fame numbers on their own so even adjusting for steroids there is no question that he had a Hall-worthy career.
One last point, Bonds was objectively a horrible player in the playoffs (other than 1 of the steroid years) and very likely caused the Pirates to miss out on going to the World Series with his repeated slumps and fuckups in the field (see below).
The person
I had always heard that that Bonds was known as an asshole off the field, but holy shit was I not prepared for how abjectly terrible a nigger he was and continues to be.
In college at Arizona, he once ran off the field in the middle of the game and caused a 10 minute delay because he had to go take a shit.
When he and his team-mates missed curfews, they were all expected to do running drills as punishment. Upon hearing this, Bonds told the team captain "Fuck you, I'm not doing shit". When Jim Brock, the Manager, heard about this he asked the team to vote on whether or not they wanted Bonds on the team.
If it wasn't for 2 idiots voting against there would have been a unanimous vote to kick him off the team. Brock didn't have the balls to do it (as he obviously should have done with such a majority being for it). Instead, Brock lowered his penalty to just a 10 mile run. Upon hearing this, Bobby Bonds apparently drove his truck onto the fucking diamond, parked it in front of the dugout and confronted Brock (mind you, this was during a closed practice). The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Early on in his Pirates career, even though he was playing exceptionally well, his team-mates absolutely hated him. A great example is as follows: Bonds got into a heated confrontation with Andy Van Slyke which resulted in a scuffle...normally you would expect team-mates to quickly break up the fight right?
Well...Van Slyke was pulled off of Bonds, but then 5-6 of his team-mates proceed to pummel the motherfucking shit out of Bonds. I have never, in my decades and decades of following sports heard of such a thing happening in a locker room.
He once shoved a pizza into a team-mate's face during a heated argument and during contract arbitration, Bonds tried to jump across the table and physically fight the Pirates' GM.
The infamous confrontation with Jim Leyland is absolutely hilarious in retrospect but really shows you who Bonds is.
Against the Braves that one year, it was Game 7 and the 9th inning. The Pirates were up 2 runs and when Van Slyke told Barry to play shallow, Bonds gave him the finger and refused. The result? A hit to Barry which scored the winning run because Bond's weak throw wasn't in time to get the runner at home plate.
In SF, he and Jeff Kent fought at least a half dozen times.
A longtime photographer for the Pirates, Pete Diana, had over the years given Barry tons of photos for free. There was an accident at the Pirates stadium where 2 members of the staff tragically died. Diana started a very nice effort to try and raise some money for the families: whenever opposing players would come to Pittsburgh, he would ask them to sign memorabilia which would then be auctioned off and the proceeds would be given to the families.
Pretty much every star player you can think of from that era signed a bunch of stuff. So then, the Giants come to town and Diana (who obviously knew Barry well) asked him to sign some stuff. Barry's response? "Fuck you, fuck them, I'm not signing shit".
Pete Diana then told Jeff Pearlman when interviewed, "I hope Barry Bonds dies". Jesus Christ.
The Giants enabled a lot of Bonds' nigger behavior. He had an entire wall of the locker room to himself, including a leather recliner and a flat screen TV in front of his chair. While everyone else had to use the team publicist, Bonds had his own 2 publicists. He had his own massage therapist and even his own photographer.
This is only a sampling of all the insane confrontations that he had with players and press. If we include his horrific behavior with the press then I'd have to make about 10 more posts of this length. He was objectively cruel and seemed almost sadistic in how he treated pretty much any member of the press. Jesus I haven't even gotten into how he used to beat his wife to a pulp (even when she was 8 months pregnant).
I'm also not going to go into the debacle that was his stint as the Marlins' hitting coach, but it just goes to show that even so many years after retiring, he was still the same old asshole. You guys can look it up, but it's all the typical uppity nigger shit: a necessity to get paid the most and getting unheard of perks, not doing shit to help players improve, clashing with other coaches and management...
Final thoughts
For so many years, all I had known was that Bonds had a terrible relationship with the press...after I started compiling all of the stories I was just shocked at how many of his team-mates hated him. I also had no idea about how cruel he was to basically everyone. If ever there has been a player in any sports league who was a detriment to his team from a leadership and example setting perspective, it was absolutely Bonds.
His stats make for a clear Hall of Fame case, however given how much of a negative influence he was, I really can't blame anyone for Bonds being left off of ballots (and this is even if he never took steroids). He's quite possibly the worst person who has ever played a sport professionally.
As I was writing this, I kept thinking about how the richest nigger neighborhoods have more crime than the most impoverished white towns in places like rural Appalachia or even your random trailer park which is half meth labs.
Whether it's some gang-banging porch monkey on a school bus beating up other kids, some hoodrat bitch fighting another heifer on a cruise or the son of a famous ball player who grew up in affluence and received every aspect of a proper upbringing, one noble truth remains: a nigger will always be a nigger.
They're the worst scum on the face of the planet and can only defile and destroy anything that they come in touch with.
In the film "48 hours", Nick Nolte's character remarks to Eddie Murphy's that "Class isn't something you buy. Look at you, you've got on a 500-dollar suit and you're still a low-life."
Sums up the career and life of Bonds rather nicely I'd say.
