As a once and possibly future baseball (specifically Dodger) fan, I have plenty of unkind things to say about Barry Bonds even ignoring the steroid controversy.
Steroids or not, I think his accomplishment is indeed great, but not, as Matt says, evidence that "Bonds is the greatest hitter to ever play." There are just physical differences between baseball as it is today and baseball as it was when Ruth or Aaron were playing. The elevation of the mound has changed. The balls themselves have become more dense. So have the bats. Training regimens have become more rigorous. These changes have all been to the benefit of hitters, and for the obvious reason that low-scoring games are much more boring than high-scoring ones.
It's difficult to say whether, correcting for those changes (and for the steroids), Ruth or Aaron would have distinguished themselves more than they did. My sense is that they would have. But who knows. Either way, good for Barry Bonds.
Yglesias is ruining you. Regimens not regiments.
Posted by: MikeJ | August 08, 2007 at 01:06 AM
Yes he is. Thanks Mike.
Posted by: Brian | August 08, 2007 at 01:14 AM
OMG: bad spelling is contagious?
Even worse, IMO, is the failure to correct things when read again or pointed out. Matt seems immune.
Example of not re-reading later:
I wonder if a similar realization was behind was behind Jonah Goldberg's [from corner bashing pt. 2]
Just a friendly comment, not a condemnation.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | August 08, 2007 at 03:09 AM
I swear... blogging makes you a worse writer in a dozen different ways.
Posted by: Brian | August 08, 2007 at 09:06 AM
Aaron also played much of his prime at the most competitive time in baseball, the period after integration but before expansion.
Posted by: mschrist | August 08, 2007 at 02:57 PM
You're nuts. Take Ruth or Aaron and put him in today's game, and he'd be pretty good. Take Bonds and drop him in the 1920s or 1960s and he'd be dominant beyond words.
In every metered sport (track, swimming, cycling... anything) each generation outdoes the previous one in accomplishment. Every quadrenium it is higher, faster, longer. There's no reason to think that while sprinters and swimmers have dominated the accomplishments of prior years that baseball players are standing still or going backwards.
They train harder, they train smarter, and they're drawn from a larger and healthier population. Today's athletes are simply better than yesterday's.
Posted by: Jeff | August 09, 2007 at 09:30 AM
You badly miss the point. What I mean is, if Ruth were alive today, playing as many games, taking as many steroids, training as hard as players today do he'd probably give 'em a good whipping.
Posted by: Brian | August 09, 2007 at 09:36 AM
Today's players represent the tip-top of a pyramid with a very wide base representing a large pool of healthy athletic kids from the USA, Japan, Korea, Venezuela, DR, PR,... hundreds of millions of people. Bonds is the pre-eminent hitter today, while the base of that pyramid is much broader than in Ruth's day when it was just whites in (a much smaller) USA.
Ruth towered over his contemporaries to a degree which won't ever be equaled in any major sport. This is undeniable. But consider just how relatively small a set of contemporaries we're talking about. He didn't even have to face all the best American pitchers! (No Bullet Rogan or Satchel Paige.)
If we're picking out the best player from a set of 50 million, and then the best player from a group of 400 million, my money is on the best player from the larger sample being the better of the two.
Posted by: Jeff | August 09, 2007 at 10:13 AM