While doing research for this post today I rediscovered the joy of dealing with statistics and I remembered that I used to enjoy dealing with stats.
In high school I was the stat keeper for the hockey team and I seem to recall doing stats for something else. I also used to keep my own statistics for Major League baseball just for the enjoyment of it.
As I was enjoying going through Barry Bonds statistics I realized a couple of things: dealing with and calculation stats is very time consuming and I need something to keep my mind occupied. The other thing I realized and decided was to turn this into a small series of post to examine some of the other possible steroid era Hall Of Famers.
Because starting to gather the stats was so time consuming I have decided I will do two postings on Barry Bonds. Mainly because I feel I am only half done evaluating the stats I want to.
With all that being said; I want to make it clear: I am not a Barry Bonds fan. My not being a fan of his goes beyond the fact that I am a diehard LA Dodger fan and the Giants have always been the Dodgers biggest rivals. In actuality, I don't like Barry because I have not heard too many good things about him and from the interviews I have seen of him he seems like a very self involved jerk. I think he was TO before TO was TO.
I do honestly believe Barry Bonds is the best all around baseball player I have ever seen. A big part of why I am doing this is because I really don't believe steroids is as big as a factor in a players statistics as the sports media seems to think.
I believe that most baseball "experts" think the steroid era started around 1998. I'm sure there are many different arguments for when the steroid era was but since this is my opinion I say 1998 was the start of it.
Since I decided the start of the steroid era was 1998 I decided to divide Bonds statistics between his rookie season in 1989 until 1997 and from 1998 until his last season in 2007. My two sources for the statistics are baseball-reference.com and MLB.com.
For the record I did not find a way to split the numbers through the websites (and believe me I tried real hard but I'm not as computer savvy as I would like) so I calculated hits and at bats myself so if there are errors the fault is all mine.
From 1986 until 1997 Bonds had 1750 hits and 6069 at bats for a batting average of .288. From 1998 Bonds had 1185 hits and 3778 at bats for a batting average of .313. I calculated the percentage difference of the two averages to be .025.
From looking at those numbers I come to the conclusion that the difference is not big enough to really make it real attributable to steroids. Couldn't it be that he got smarter and better as a hitter?
Next, I examined his home run numbers. I personally am a bit surprised by what I found there. From 1986 to 1997 Bonds hit 374 homers at an average around 31 per year. From 1998 until his last season in '07 Bonds hit 388 homers for and average around 39 per year. If I did it right I calculated the difference to be around 1.26 homers per year difference.
I was surprised because I expected the difference to be larger.
I will think about that and look at his On Base Percentage and Slugging before I come to a conclusive conclusion.
But that is all for right now. I think I tired myself out and that is good.
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