TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Friday, October 15, 2004

Baseball-Reference.com Adds 2004 Stats

Our friends at baseball-reference.com have posted the 2004 stats into their database. Of course, the first guy I looked at in his new all-time contexts was Barry Bonds. Something remarkable jumps out at one everytime one takes a fresh look at his jacket, and today I was noticing Barry's similarity scores by age. He's now most similar to Willie Mays and Babe Ruth by career, and the top ten of his similarities area ll Hall of Famers (save Rafael Palmeiro). (His similarity scores to anybody, however, are going down -- he's only a 797 (79.7%) to Willie Mays -- because his uniqueness as a hitter is making him more of an outlier.) But if you look at it by age, Barry started out similar to Tom Brunansky at age 22, Jack Clark at 23, Bobby Bonds at 27, Greg Luzinski at 28, and Shawn Green at 29. Only at 30 does he compare up to a Hall of Famer, Duke Snider, and then he compares to Frank Robinson, Ken Griffey Jr, Mickey Mantle, and finally Willie Mays at age 39. I truly hope Bonds can be exonerated from any potential taint of this record by allegations of steroid use, because interpreting the arc of his career since age 30 is going to be an extremely difficult task otherwise. We know he's demographically an utter outlier now. Why? is the question. Baseball is already one of the few sports where its star athletes bloom "late", starting at age 27, in part due to the fact that the central skills of the sport must be supplemented by knowledge, insight, experience -- wisdom. Part of that wisdom, of course, is tuning one's body to the sport, and Bonds has clearly done that even while he's developed the greatest batting eye since Ted Williams. Since Ted Williams? Williams led the AL in walks eight times (he surely would have done it more without his military service intervening), with a steak of seven ending at age 32 and one last time at age 35. He led the league in OPS at age 39, like Barry -- but by only 7 points over Mickey Mantle, with Rock Colavito close behind. This year, with a seasonal age of 39, Bonds was nearly 350 points ahead of his trailers, Todd Helton and Albert Pujols. There seem to be more players than ever 40 and older playing at star levels. Is Bonds the first of a new kind of ballplayer, or just the most unique (hitter) ever? Time on all these counts will tell, of course.

posted by The Crank 8:42 AM