Barry Bonds, On-Base%, Value ...

Third post about Barry Bonds in two days, but this is my blog and it's good to vent.


First, for reference, here is a list of all-time leaders in on-base% for a season.

Bonds set the single-season record last year with .582. Only 18 times in the history of baseball has a player achieved an on-base% of .500. This has been achieved only 13 times since the beginning of the 20th Century, and only three times since 1957 -- zero times since 1957 by somebody other than Barry Bonds.


Secondly, for reference, here is a list of the all-time leaders in batting average for a season.

The highest batting average ever is .440, but the highest batting average in the modern era is .424 by Rogers Hornsby, and this is generally acknowledged as the highest single-season batting average ever.


If one compares the difficulty of a .400 batting average to a .500 on-base%, one finds quite a few similarities.

Only 28 players have achieved a .400 batting average and disproportionate amount (13) occurred in the 19th Century. Everybody is aware that the last player to hit .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. (Not coincidentally, Williams is also the only modern-day player who challenges Bonds in the on-base% category.)


Thirdly, what is the value of on-base%? Some claim it's even more important than batting average.

On-base% has less historical significance than plain old batting average and ob% is not one of the three coveted and well-loved "scoreboard stats," but ob%'s importance is understood by a growing number of sabermetricians, fans, players, and, perhaps most telling, the GMs who cut the checks and pay the players.

Also, one merely needs to take a gander at the overall offensive stats in MLB and sort by runs. Just look at the on-base% column and you'll see it correlates strongly to runs scored, while the batting average column does not. There's more to scoring runs, of course, but a strong argument can be made that ob% is more valuable than batting average. (That's what we're all trying to do, right? Score runs?)


So, what's the case I am building? What is the inevitable conclusion? Well, the conclusion is that 2004 Bonds is one of the greatest seasons in the history of baseball.

I don't think people are quite understanding what is happening when a baseball player's on-base% is .620. I don't thnk Joe Buck knows what he's saying when he claims that Rolen is a better fielder than Bonds and therefore a strong NL MVP candidate.

Maybe that's the problem. What Bonds is doing is so utterly unprecedented, it's impossible to put into perspective. It's like giving the MVP to Larry Walker because nobody understood yet just how much Coors Field inflated the stats.

Imagine, for a moment, if a baseball player in 2004 was going after the highest batting average of all time. Imagine if that player was shattering the record by forty points.

Forget about the first player since 1941 to hit .400. This guy is hitting .464, forty points higher than Hornsby. He's hitting .464 in late August when that batting average would be quite impressive for a week, much less an entire season.

Then, imagine that player not winning the MVP. You'd sound like a fool if you suggested that the player batting .464 was not the MVP of the league.

The analogy between a .620 ob% and a .464 ba might not be perfect, but I think it's pretty close if you look at the history of baseball. There is more to baseball "value" than just ob%, of course. The ob% leader in the AL is the unfairly-forgotten Melvin Mora, and he might not win the AL MVP, he might not deserve the AL MVP.

But, for some more perspective on the matter, Mora is trailing Bonds in ob% by how many points? 190.