Friday, July 23, 2004
Meaningless Bonds Stat of the Day
One of the interesting contrasts of Barry Bonds' statistical record is he's never been a career .300 hitter. .300 of course was the traditional dividing line between a great hitter and a not-great hitter in the old-think. I'm always reminded of poor Jim Rice, stuck just shy of 400 HR and just shy of .300 (at .298)...if he's stuck around one more year he'd've had the home run milestone back when that was enough to get you into the hall of fame, and if he'd left the game one year earlier he'd've had .300, which would've helped.
In any event, Bonds is sitting on a .299 average, career, this year, and has been hitting about .364 at this writing. If he gets another 140 official at-bats (about whatt he's on pace for right now) and hits about .364 the rest of the way, he'll end up the year with the old career number right on .300.
One of the ironies, or at least eccentricities, of Bonds' prodigious on-base skills is he doesn't really quite appreciate them himself. He made a lot out of his finally winning a batting title a couple of years back, ignoring his half dozen OBP titles. But they don't give out silver bats for OBP.
In some ways, while I think the odds of this happening are diminishingly small at this point, it would be kind of cool if Bonds' career batting average ended up below .300, so we'd never be able to call him a "career .300 hitter" even as we admire him as the greatest offensive ballplayer of all-time in future years. It would be a useful way of dividing up the eras of baseball thought: the batting average era gives way to the OBP era, much as Ruth is synonymous with the dead ball era giving up its ghost.
posted by The Crank 12:01 AM
