Rose v. Bonds

This one deserves its own post. Late last night a few HoG regulars got into a little kerfuffle in the comments section of this piece, a piece in which Cecil related a conversation between a couple of cranky old sports-talkers. The gist of the blue-hairs' argument: Pete Rose is the second-greatest living baseball player after Willie Mays. Dumb, but when you're 70 and you only sleep an hour a night you have to talk about something.

In those comments, Cecil, Banky, the sultry vixen Blanche Feverpiss and myself debated the relative merits in the argument. At one point I listed my personal picks for the Five Greatest Living Ballplayers:

Mine goes Mays, Barry, Aaron, Musial, ARod. Rose somewhere in the top 10 I suppose.

To which Banky, who wears his Rose-lovin' bona fides on his sleeve, responded:

I wasn't platooning for anything Rose-related there. Only wanted you to sober up and remove Bonds and Rodriguez. Since you mentioned it though, wise-ass, what stats did your boy Barry put up besides homers and the RBIs associated with them?

I have no desire to embarrass anyone, particularly my good friends. But I cannot abide by such shortsighted hijinks on this site. We'll have the Fire Joe Morgan police around here in no time. Plus, you called me a wise-ass. That was uncalled for. After the jump, the definitive Pete Rose versus Barry Bonds.

I know that "statistics" are pesky things to some, because they get in the way of such kernels of wisdom as "Pete Rose's uniform was the dirtiest in history" and "Barry Bonds poaches baby koala bears in the offseason." No reasonable baseball fan, however, could ever say that Pete Rose in anywhere near Barry in terms of career accomplishments or skill.

Just to get started, let's take another scrappy, beloved, hustling, dirty-uniformed scamp: Lenny Dykstra. Everybody loved Lenny. Ran through walls. Did all the little things. Now would anyone ever say that Lenny was better than Pete Rose? Of course not. And why is that? Pete Rose is the Hit King, with 4256 knocks. Lenny only tallied 1298. Case closed, due solely to those damned stats.

Now Banky's premise is that the only thing that Barry surpasses Pete in are homers and RBIs, which of course is completely false--we'll get to that in a minute. We first need to establish that home runs and runs batted in are two extremely relevant measures of winning baseball games. I know you watch the Royals, so you see someone hit a home run less than once a week, but those hits change games. They win games. And this is why home run hitters are exalted as some of the game's best.

Now I know that homers are not the only relevant baseball stat. Rob Deer hit a lot of taters, and he was a terrible player. Jack Cust hit 26 bombs in only 395 ABs last year, but is capable of little else. Everyone knows that a one-dimensional home run hitter has no place among the elite of the sport. But Barry Bonds excelled at every single phase of the game, and has played at such a high level for so long it's an insult to even compare Rose to him.

Barry does have 502 more homers that Rose, but those don't count by your metric. Never mind that such legendary players as Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial and Dave Winfield never hit 502 HR, nor did Johnny Bench or George Brett. In another stat we need to ignore, Bonds has 682 more RBI than Charlie Hustle. That's about as many ribbies as Willie Randolph or Gene Tenace had, and those guys turned in pretty solid careers.

Keep in mind as well that Barry put up these worthless, disposable numbers in 576 fewer games (about 3.5 full seasons) and 4206 fewer at-bats.

Let's go to some other stats, throwing those gaudy, stupid HR and RBI numbers in the rubbish bin. Barry scored more runs that Pete, had more total bases, and walked a thousand times more. A thousand! Barry's OBA is almost 70 points higher (.444 to .375) and his slugging almost 200 points better (.607 to .409).

Most damaging to your case is this: take Barry's hits, walks and hit-by-pitches--the total number of times he reached first base on his own. You get 5599. Take the same compilation for Pete and you get 5919, a difference of five per cent. Ignore Pete's amazing accumulation of base hits and simply tally times on base (after all, what's the difference?), and Barry's within five per cent of Pete. In 30 per cent fewer at bats. And 762 of those times he reached first he just kept on jogging home, but those don't count.

But those are career numbers, and we of course recognize one big blemish on Barry's career. The juice. It's impossible to know how legitimate Barry's stats are because of the various rubs and oils he ingested and smeared upon himself. Let's not even get into how many amphetamines Pete Rose gobbled, or how much cream and clear he would have slathered had he been born in a different era. So if you want to throw away not only Barry's dumb-ass power numbers but also call into question his entire body of work, fine. Give me Pittsburgh Barry, skinny Barry, and I'll still trump your Hit King.

Barry played seven seasons at Three Rivers. He hit only .274, well below Pete's .303 career mark. But his OBA was comparable (.379 to .375) and his slugging superior (.503 to .409) to those of Rose, even in a pitcher's park, before his prime and, most would agree, long before he began his program of artificial enhancement.

Pittsburgh Barry hit more homers (176 to 160) and stole more bases (251 to 198) than Cincinnati/Philadelphia/Montreal/Cincinnati Pete, in (this is important) just about a quarter of the at-bats (3584 to 14,053). Again, these are Barry's numbers prior to anyone ever suspecting or accusing him of turning himself into a science experiment. Thus far the definitive document on Barry's juice-tory is Game Of Shadows, whose authors allege that Barry only got on the BALCO after the summer of 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa received praise and adulation for rewriting the record books. If this account is to be believed, Barry was clean for the first six years of his tenure in San Francisco, when he won one MVP, finished in the top five in voting in three other MVP races, and drove in 660 runs.

But because that uniform change is significant to most, we're sticking with Pittsburgh Barry and his one-fourth of Pete Rose's career. If you quadruple his counting stats to make up for Pete's insane number of career ABs, you get total numbers, for a player who almost every fan would concede was clean, that dwarf those of Rose. 600 more runs. 1400 more total bases. More doubles, more triples, more walks--and oh by the way, nearly double the RBI, four times the homers (though he doesn't catch Aaron or Ruth) and five times the steals. And although Pete retains his Hit King title, Pittsburgh Barry Times Four gives it a run, tallying 3936 base knocks. Take away his steroids and give him Rose's at-bats, and Pittsburgh Barry Times Four annihilates Charlie Hustle.

Now are these extrapolated stats really valid? Of course not. There's no way PBx4 would or could maintain the stolen base rate of his 20s, for instance. But we're also stripping the accumulated wisdom, plate discipline and pitcher knowledge that Barry acquired in his 30s from him. Not to mention the completely legitimate workout regimen he added to get stronger and better year after year. He did, of course, pharmaceutically augment that regimen, which casts his many accomplishments into doubt, but he was still an amazingly complete player in his early years.

BONUS ARGUMENTS! When Banky caught wind of this post, he sent me the following text:

Make sure you talk about what a great fielder and team member your idolized home run king was.

I'd be happy to! Fact is neither was a great fielder, although both were well above average. Barry won 13 Gold Gloves while Pete took home seven. I know, Gold Gloves are bullshit and rarely go to the best defensive players. But Barry Bonds was, in his younger days, a fluid and graceful outfielder. He could have made a damn good centerfielder, but he played left due to his gimpy bitch arm. Our lasting memory of Barry in the field will always be his inability to nail cement-footed Sid Bream at the plate during Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS, a play that cost Barry his best shot at a World Series ring. I can't defend that throw--Kenny Lofton, Johnny Damon and Juan Pierre all give Barry shit about his arm.

But where is Pete's legacy of defensive greatness? How was his arm? What did he do with the leather in the biggest moments of his career? All of these answers can be found here. Pete Rose was a hitter, pure and simple. He most certainly gets points in this argument for versatility, and for playing more demanding defensive positions than Barry. He logged 73 games in center, 590 in right, 628 at second, 634 at third, 673 in left, and 939 at first. Remarkable. There's no way Barry could have handled those infield positions, with the possible exception of first base, with nearly the skill and grace of Rose.

If you compare only their time in left field, Barry notched a .984 fielding percentage while Pete's was .991. Again, I know that FP is a largely debunked stat and that new versions of adjusted range factor I don't understand come out all the time. I'll also acknowledge that Pete tallied outfield assists at a higher rate (about one for every 13 games) in left than did Barry (one for 16). But what does that mean? Rarely do the best outfielders tally the gaudiest assist numbers, because no one runs on them. Vlad Guererro and Ichiro are feared and throw almost no one out, while Manny is always near the top of the AL in assists because baserunners and third-base coaches think he's a joke and test his arm all the time.

But Omar Vizquel's a far better fielder than either, is he the Greatest Living Ballplayer? Of course not. These guys are pure hitters who played the field because they had to. I'll give Pete a slight edge in the field, but nowhere near the enormous edge Barry has at the plate.

Finally, let's dispense with those annoying and one-sided stats to get to Banky's final argument: Who was the better teammate? This is entirely subjective, of course, and open to whatever biases one wants to impose. It's easy to say that Barry's a cocksucker, he got into a fight with Jeff Kent (who's a stellar teammate himself), he took up half the locker room with his TVs and recliners, he created distractions, etc.

But how great a teammate, really, was Pete Rose? I've noticed that in his twin quests for reinstatement and the Hall of Fame, none of his contemporaries have stood up for him. Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, all silent. None of these guys are giving interviews pleading for a second chance. Who's to say that any of them liked Pete, that they didn't all hate his guts? Pete Rose was a cocky, red-ass prick most of the time. His post-baseball life has been checkered with repeated incidents of selfishness, dishonesty and doublecrossing. What would lead one to believe that he was a better teammate than Barry Bonds? Oh yeah, the hustle. Which I'm sure some teammates took as showing them up or making them look bad.

Look, I (mostly) love Pete Rose, and I (mostly) hate Barry Bonds. One thing I despise about being a grown-up is that my relationships with athletes like these guys becomes complicated--by their personalities, their off-the-field bullshit, the money they make. I wish I could just say that Peyton Manning and Brett Favre suck, but in reality they're two of the greatest players to every stick their hands under some dude's nuts. I wish Kobe was a horrible player, because I truly believe he's a horrible human being, but I have to acknowledge that he's a few short years away from surpassing Jordan as the greatest player of all time. These are objective realities we must face.

Does any of this really change anyone's mind? Probably not. If you recognize that baseball is composed of eminently measurable and comparable empirical data, you knew it already. If you subscribe to a set of outdated, romantic notions and you willfully ignore huge mountains of evidence to the contrary, you can truly convince yourself of anything. Hell, a jury acquitted O.J. Lots of people have seen UFOs. Plenty of folks are positive that Tupac, Elvis and Kennedy are alive. And in some remote hollers of Western Missourah, at least one brave man thinks Pete Rose was a better baseball player than Barry Bonds. Bless his heart.