What to do with Barry Bonds and his numbers...

Most baseball fans are aware of ESPN's recent communal effort to rank the top 100 players in MLB history.  Many of you thought #MLBRANK, poorly-conceived hashtag and all, were...well, rank.  Some of the picks were, to be certain.  I had strong disagreements with many of the personalized lists - the only possible exception being Jayson Stark's.  He seems to always make an effort to be level in his judgements.  But I'll delve into that topic in some upcoming posts.  Here, I want to focus on Bonds.  

If you look at the top 10 in all-time Wins Above Replacement on baseball-reference.com, only two come with baggage:

1) BABE RUTH - 183.7

2) CY YOUNG - 170.3

3) BARRY BONDS - 162.4

4) WILLIE MAYS - 156.2

5) WALTER JOHNSON - 152.3

6) TY COBB - 151.0

7) HANK AARON - 142.6

8) ROGER CLEMENS - 139.4

9) TRIS SPEAKER - 133.7

10) HONUS WAGNER - 131.0

Yep, the 'roiders.  Here we go again.

Many fans seem to take one of these two extreme and opposite stances on Bonds' statistics:

1) "I'm tired of thinking about steroids.  He accomplished all of these amazing things, and he was on a pretty awesome trajectory before steroids anyway, so let's just count all of it and say he was in the top 3 all-time."

2) "DAMN ANY PED-USING DEVIL TO HELL!  NO HALL OF FAME AND NO TOP TEN OR TOP ONE HUNDRED OR TOP ONE BILLION FOR THIS AMORAL FOOL!"

Why can't there be a middle ground?  Probably because it's so difficult to find.  I'll try my best to present a reasonable alternative.

I'll keep this simple.  Bonds diverged from "reality" around age 36 and onward.  Elite power hitters don't put up their BIGGEST numbers at that age without the cream and the clear.  

I have a couple bar graphs to show you.  Don't be scared.  

Let's look at all (actually, most) of the hitters in MLB history who hit 400+ homers and accumulated 100+ WAR.  There have been exactly 13 such players.  

I excluded only 3.  Which 3, and why?

1) A-Rod - two reasons.  He is also a known PED user, and therefore not a good reference point.  Also, he is an active player so he isn't done accumulating stats.

2) Pujols.  I'll leave the PED speculation alone.  This is just because he's an active player.

3) Gehrig.  A legend who was derailed by ALS, and walked off the field at age 36.  It would be depressing to include his zeroes in these graphs.

OK, ready?

Bonds is the clear outlier here.  268 HR and 51.5 WAR...AFTER age 35?  Yeah, right.

Williams only shows such high percentages because he lost three of his peak years to World War II, lending added weight to the tail end of his career.  Aaron and Musial had pretty awesome HR production in their later years, but nothing to compare with Bonds.

My suggestion is as follows:

Apply the MEDIAN percentages from the other hitters in these graphs to Bonds.  See what we get.  That means Bonds only gets to add totals worth 15.5% for WAR (like Musial) and 19.1% for HR (like Mays) to what he had entering the year 2001.

What's the result?

Bonds would have a total of 131.4 WAR (adding 20.4 instead of 51.4) and 611 HR (adding 117 instead of 268).

This would place him 9th in WAR (assuming no further adjustments to the list) and 8th in HR (with A-Rod still third).

It's a real shame that he had such hubris and went for the records, when he could've been respected forever as a legitimate top 10 player.  Instead he'll be debated and, in many circles, disdained forever.