Barry Bonds is the DEVIL!!!

.777 BA / .700 OPB / 1.700 SLG = 2.400 OPS

3 singles, 1 double, 3 homeruns, 1 sac bunt, 2 strikeouts, 0 walks (it's spring training)

"Over the first 13 seasons of his career ... Bonds hit .290 and averaged 32 home runs and 93 RBI. ... But in the six seasons after he began using performance-enhancing drugs -- that is, ... between the ages of 34 and 40 -- Bonds's batting averaged .328, 39, and 105."

See here folks, RBIs are dependent on steroids. This is THE TRUTH.

erm... is that us??

i lurked on ILB during the playoff/series, it was kind of dead here. surprised to see it get this busy in the off-season -- i'm guessing it's cos of fantasy leagues? don't do em myself, figure i'd get too into it.

i've been wanting to ask this, do people get into rotisserie because they're stats heads or do they become stats heads because they're into rotisserie?

Then we paid a stat service in New York where you phoned in transactions by numbers assigned to each player, and they mailed a weekly standings and stats packet to each player.

I don't see much of a correlation between stathead interest and roto interest. On the stat side you've got a lot of people like Morbius who despise it, and roto leagues by their nature (wins, era, saves) don't lend themselves to stat-headism. I'm hoping next year to talk people into changing one of our money leagues to something more stat friendly - OPS, k-rate, etc.., for a change of pace.

Um, I consider myself on the root-root-root-for-the-real-team side. (And many of you have a better idea of what VORP and BABIP mean than I do.) If you look at the Baseball Prospectus site these days, those guys play plenty of roto, and are playing this game for charity:

http://www.scoresheet.com/baseball/index.html

and roto leagues by their nature (wins, era, saves) don't lend themselves to stat-headism.

Unless you change the stats.

Back to Topic Bighead... Jim Baker of BP thinks he's sunk HOFwise; unless PEDs become accepted in the culture. anyone agree?

"What are Bonds' chances at the Hall of Fame? From the sound of things, they're not very good. The general stinginess of the voting committee does not bode well for him and if I were Mark McGwire, I wouldn’t be busting out the scenic New York state tourist brochures anytime soon, either....he is not well-positioned emotionally to rehabilitate his image. He is not the type to cultivate favor among the press. A tear-stained mea culpa is not likely on his agenda. Even if he could conjure such an out of character performance, it is highly unlikely that voters will give him a pass on his transgressions and judge him on the merits of his pre-enhancement days. I think he’s pretty much hosed unless he saves 10 or 20 babies from a burning building at some point in the next few years. Even then, those babies had better be related to men on the voting committee.

Unless…

Things change. A lot.

This is a stretch but there may come a time many decades down the line wherein performance enhancement is no longer a cause celeb. It could be that 30, 40 or 50 years from now researchers will have found a way to artificially improve the human physique and abilities without nasty side effects. These artificial improvements will become commonplace and accepted. In a climate such as that, it could be possible for a Hall of Fame veterans committee to look back at what Bonds did and either wonder what all the fuss was about or, stranger still, see him as some sort of pioneer in the proper method for artificial self-improvement. It’s not the sort of future I would endorse, but, given the great strides made in that direction so far, it is one that is certainly possible."

The lawsuit is built around California's Unfair Competition Law, Business and Professions Code section 17200, that states if one person is able to market something by committing an unlawful act, it puts others who act lawfully at an unfair disadvantage.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-bonds-homelessaunt&prov=ap&type=lgns

1) i had no idea he only needed 47 HRs to tie when i made that prediction upthread

2) viewing ESPN's Bonds on Bonds right now. he's not exactly coming across as humble. anyone else watching?

I only caught the last 15 mins or so, complete w/ "I don't give a shit" sobbing. For a BB propaganda show, this martyr stuff is not a wise angle. (People kvetching over ESPN like it's a news organization make me laugh, tho.)

>>But baseball is still the intellectual game; it's the game most compelling to the likes of Ken Burns and George Will and Yo La Tengo>Baseball is the only sport where numbers always seem meaningful, and it's the only sport where a numeric comparison between players of different eras is even halfway reasonable.

I don't have the stat handy but Barry has hit more homeruns off more pitchers than anyone in history by a large margin. This isn't the Babe Ruth days...

As far as the DH thing goes, Bonds is the Giants only marquee player. until last year, he was perpetually healthy and the best player in baseball. So the Giants signed him to a long-term contract. That contract backfired in 2005, and in 2006 he has been a liability SO FAR. But

(1) would the Giants trade their main draw in a trade that couldn't possibly yield any real value
(2) would anyone want a gimpy dh who will probably be booed by the home fans and makes $20mil per year?
(3) would bonds accept the trade, given that the yankees, sox, a's, tribe and chisox have a dh already, and that the remainder of the contenders can't afford him? that leaves a bunch of teams that bonds probably wouldn't accept a trade to, being a 10-5 guy.

dude, bernie williams...

Bonds changes his mind on this stuff every week. His knee must feel like shit this week. Next week if it's feeling better and he hits a couple of dingers he'll say he'll play until he passes Aaron or drops dead, whichever comes first. This honestly wouldn't surprise me.

i don't think he's gonna pass aaron, though.

Bernie hasn't DHed for the Bombers in approximately two weeks, and to my knowledge the Yankees don't plan to put him back in there, and Giambi is effectively the DH at this point. I could be wrong, but hey.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/04/23/SPGODIDV1K1.DTL

Aaron Cook joined Bonds' "life list" of pitchers to surrender his home runs. He is No. 417. It was Bonds' 25th at Coors Field.

Probably. I remember during Tony Gwynn's last season, Rickey Henderson told him "I've got an idea... you hit, I run and play defense." Ideally, that would be the way to go for Bonds at this point.

Aaron's OPS his last season was .684 (.687 the year previous).