MLB: Mr. Oct-oh-ber: An Unfortunate Ode to Barry Bonds

The second week of October always seems like the wrong time to say this, but I’ll say it anyway: Barry Bonds’ baseball career will never be fully appreciated.

Now, I’m certain most people will consider this sentiment preposterous. For one thing, it’s pretty safe to assume that most people, outside of bitter Pittsburgh Pirates fans or Internet trolls, consider Bonds a unique baseball talent. For another, Bonds’ more damning characteristics clearly seem to beg the reputation of a less-than-perfect baseball player:

- Bonds “isn’t a team player.”

- Bonds “is rude to the media.”

- Bonds “chokes during the playoffs.”

Obviously, as bad as the first two sound, it’s this third point that (barring any events later in his career to reverse this image) will haunt Bonds well after he retires; in fact, its specter will grow and grow after his playing days are done. It will probably become his legacy. Mr. Oct-oh-ber.

Well, Bonds hasn’t been oh-for-October. Not quite, at least.

He’s now appeared in five playoff series, one for every year his teams have made the playoffs–not counting the 1998 National League wild card playoff, which was actually considered a regular season loss. Counting his 3-for-17 performance in the Giants’ four-game loss to the Mets this past week, Bonds is a career .196 hitter (19-for-97) in the postseason, with only a marginally better on-base percentage of .328. In those 97 at-bats, Bonds has managed just one home run.

What is worse, Bonds’ October failures have not occurred quietly. There was his grimacing in 1990, his mouthing-off to the press in 1991, his failure to gun down tortoise-like Sid Bream in 1992, and now the 2000 postseason has brought about another image of failure–Bonds, bat on his shoulder, watching strike three sneak past him to end an epic Game Two loss to the Mets.

I am not using this space to mock Bonds for these failures; on the other hand, I’m not writing to defend Bonds’ postseason performance either. Whenever a great player, such as Bonds or Frank Thomas, fails in the playoffs, there are two standard responses, depending on how you analyze the game of baseball. The first response, which is certainly held by the baseball media and I suspect is held by the majority of the fans, is that the player “chokes” when the games “mean something”–in other words, that the player can’t perform on a bigger, more pressing stage. The other response, which I don’t believe is as widely articulated, is that postseason performances are too heavily affected by luck, by bad bounces and the like that tend to even-out over the regular season–which is to say, too small a sample size. After all, Pat Borders was once a World Series MVP.

Statistically speaking, the latter view is irrefutably correct. In Bonds’ case, 97 at-bats don’t tell you anything about his ability to hit, postseason or not. He’s five hits away from .250, or ten hits away from .300. If you really think about the nature of base hits in baseball, the way some balls seemingly hit out of a cannon turn into outs and some weak grounders turn into hits, the difference doesn’t seem that great. I’d venture to guess that you could take any current star player and find something like a 19-for-97 slump at some point in his career.

Yet, the “choker” point of view has to count for something, right? The playoffs are supposed to be about the best of the best, correct? As Joe Morgan has stated about a dozen times already this postseason, “Lots of guys can beat up on mediocre pitching; in the playoffs, you have to beat up great pitching.” And, over a decade now, Bonds has in a sense proven that he can’t. Like Thomas and Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens, he just “can’t” deliver during the postseason.

I’m not quite sure how to address this paradox–how a guy who dominates during the regular season is rendered punchless during the postseason–so I’ll leave that to the sportswriters, who certainly are sure that they can address such matters. Judging by just the headlines alone (both the CNNSI and CBS Sportsline web sites list stories entitled “Junk Bonds”), the criticism will be harsh.

I read a story on another Internet site a few months ago, the premise of which was that Ted Williams wasn’t really all that great a player. The writer compared Williams to Joe DiMaggio, a comparison which invariably leads to a one-liner like “Ted Williams has exactly as many World Series rings as you or I.” In particular, the writer argued that DiMaggio was a winner because he wasn’t afraid to swing at the tough pitch and drive his teammates in, while Williams was a loser because he was content to keep his bat on his shoulder and draw walks.

This line of reasoning will earn you the label of “mediot” (ie, “media idiot”) on an intelligent forum like the Usenet newsgroup rec.sport.baseball, and not without merit. It’s almost always a specious argument when one baseball player is labeled a “winner” and another a “loser,” because such an argument reduces the game of baseball to an overly individual level, when in fact one player’s contribution is rather limited. Even the best player in the league, upon systematic reflection, is rarely worth more than eight wins above the average player over the course of the season. Beyond that, the writer was making the “RBI Vulture” argument–the point of view that exaggerates the value of the RBI statistic for individual players and fails to address the negative value of outs, which even with very good hitters result 65 percent of the time. The poster boy for this kind of argument is Joe Carter, who racked up 10 seasons of 100 RBIs or more but retired with a career .310 on-base percentage.

Still, one must consider that if the writer’s argument were put in a playoff context, maybe it makes a certain amount of sense. Take Bonds’ final out in Game Two of the Mets series, the called third strike. For those that did not see the game, Bonds struck out looking at a 3-2 pitch from John Franco to end the Giants’ rally in the 10th inning. (It should be noted that Bonds’ lead-off double in the ninth started the Giants’ comeback from a three-run deficit, capped by J.T. Snow’s home run.) Taking Franco’s pitch, which appeared to be inside, is not in general a bad strategy; in fact, many of cleanup hitter Jeff Kent’s 125 RBIs over the course of the season are no doubt a result of Bonds’ keen batting eye.

This is the postseason, however, and maybe the nature of a playoff game is slightly different than that of a regular season game. To that end, it is worth noting that Morgan criticized Snow for drawing a walk in Game Four–the walk set forth a chain of events that resulted in pitcher Mark Gardner popping out with the bases loaded and two outs. Morgan argued that Snow should have been more aggressive because otherwise he just played into the Mets’ hands. While Morgan reminds the viewing audience three dozen times every game that he was a member of the Big Red Machine, this doesn’t render him immune from criticism. Perhaps, though, in that in the postseason offensive production is reduced and each single run holds more value, Morgan has a valid point.

Perhaps this explains the poor postseason histories of selective hitters like Bonds and Thomas (and Mark McGwire, his homer versus Atlanta notwithstanding). Perhaps several potential game-breaking hits are instead of walks in their ledger. Perhaps Bonds should be more aggressive at the plate if he ever again reaches the postseason. (Please note that this is conjecture; I’ve never seen a study on selective hitters vs. hackers in the postseason.)

Perhaps the playoffs are a different game, one for which Bonds is not well-suited. Or, perhaps Bonds cannot handle the pressure of the playoffs. Maybe Barry Bonds really is a “choker.”

In other words, this paradox is full of “perhaps.” I’m not qualified to answer, and neither is any sportswriter, and neither really is any other fan. I’m not even sure if Bonds, minus his usual postering, could explain it. It is worth noting that the two consensus “Players of the Nineties,” Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr., have a combined zero World Series appearances.

I know how many people despise Bonds for his haughtiness and selfishness, but it’s a shame that, barring any reversal of postseason fortune, the greatest player of this generation will be remembered as an incomplete performer, a guy who folded under the pressure of big games. It is unfortunate because Bonds has been the best player in his league probably seven or eight different seasons in his career. Moreoever, it is unfortunate because Bonds in fact HAS performed at a higher level when his team’s season was on the line. Among his best months ever are the Septembers of 1992, 1993, 1997, 1998, and 2000. Bonds HAS performed exceptionally under pressure, just not in October.

Before the playoffs began, Bonds told the media, "They say 'You suck during the playoffs.' So I suck. It took Barry Bonds to get you to the playoffs in the first place.”

While brash, these words are true. In the end, though, I don’t think they’ll be considered. As a result, a truly great star will likely be remembered as a truly enigmatic player–a Hall of Famer, certainly, but not a legend.