Willie Mays had taken on the title of Greatest Living Ballplayer after the passing of Joe DiMaggio in 1999, and with the “Say Hey Kid” now gone, we have to assign a new guy to the role.
Without question, we have to go to, and it pains me to write this, but even so, Barry Bonds.
I don’t even want to recognize Bonds as the all-time home run king, but let’s face facts, he’s that guy, and he’s a seven-time MVP, an eight-time Gold Glove winner, 12-time Silver Slugger winner, fourth all-time in WAR, fifth all-time in OPS.
Yes, there’s the steroids issue, which is why he’s not in the Hall of Fame, though that omission makes no logical sense.
Players, for decades, used a PED that they called “greenies,” i.e. amphetamines, the use of which dated back to World War II, giving guys plenty of extra juice to make it through the six-month, 154- and then 162-game schedule, and were only banned by MLB in 2006.
Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt wrote in a 2006 book that the elimination of greenies could have “possibly far greater implications for the game than the crackdown against steroids.”
Nobody from the greenies era was penalized for their widespread use when it came time for Hall of Fame voting, and yet, we penalize steroids-era guys like Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, among others, though it’s fun to note that David Ortiz somehow escaped the sanctioning, probably because he was perceived as a nice guy.
Willie Mays benefitted from that same perception, as did the likes of DiMaggio and Henry Aaron, the amiable “Hammerin’ Hank.”
Nothing about Bonds is anywhere near amiable or even remotely likable, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that he was the best player of his generation, spanning the 1980s, the 1990s and a good portion of the first decade of the 2000s.
He was a three-time MVP in the greenies era, pre-1994, and then won four more in the ‘roids era, post-1994, and if you want to discount what he did then because of the brand of PEDs that he was using then, it should be factored in that he wasn’t the only guy in that era on the juice, that contemporaries were saying then that as much as 90 percent of the league was gassing.
Basically, if they’re all doing it, does anybody have an advantage, is the same question that we could ask about the greenies era.
Eliminating that objection to Bonds being the Greatest Living Ballplayer, then, we still have to account for the perception, well earned on his part, that Bonds is as insufferable twit, and that we’d rather have an ambassador type, like Mays was, like DiMaggio was, representing the game.
I’ll counter that with, have any of us believed in the infallibility of ballplayers since Jim Bouton’s Ball Four?
Barry Bonds is a horse’s ass; he’s also the Greatest Living Ballplayer.
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Chris Graham
