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| TODAY: Monday, May 15 | ||||||
| Bonds challenging Ted and Stan as best ever ESPN.com | ||||||
Before the arrival of Barry Bonds, there were two candidates, and only two, for the title of Greatest Left Fielder: Ted Williams and Stan Musial. But by almost any objective measures, Bonds has joined those two wonderful ballplayers.
OBP Slug OPS
Williams .483 .634 1117
Musial .418 .559 977
Bonds .410 .561 971
Just looking at the raw hitting stats, Williams is in a league by himself. And in fact, only Babe Ruth can compare with Williams purely as a hitter.
But as people are only so happy to remind me, there's more to baseball than just hitting. What about defense and baserunning?
Musial was such a wonderful left fielder that he played more than a thousand games at first base. OK, that's not really fair. Musial's range was reportedly decent enough when he was young (though an arm injury suffered in the minor leagues limited this throwing ability). Still, nobody ever considered Musial an outstanding defensive player. And Williams has been the first to admit he never paid much attention while standing in front of the Green Monster.
And that brings us to Bonds. Barry Bonds. He of the eight Gold Gloves and 465 stolen bases. One might argue that Bonds is the best all-around player since Willie Mays, given his abilities to do almost everything you'd want a ballplayer to do. How to quantify these contributions? Well, Total Baseball employs a metric called Total Player Rating (TPR), which purports to combine most measurable contributions into one number that tells us how many win a player was worth, compared to an average player at the same position. Here's how our three left fielders fare:
Years TPR TPR/Yr
Williams 17 84.0 4.94
Musial 21 70.1 3.34
Bonds 13 79.0 6.08
One, in case you were wondering, TPR does include offensive adjustments for a player's home ballpark. Two, I left out 1952 and '53 for Williams, as he spent nearly all of both seasons in the Marines. Three, to my continuing frustration, Total Baseball has not updated their stats to include 1999, so Bonds' stats are one season and one month short of his entire career. And four, Wow. If you consider TPR per season, Bonds tops both Musial and Williams with ease. And if you look at career TPR, Bonds will likely pass Williams this year.
On a single-season basis, Total Baseball says Williams was the best player in his league seven different seasons (1941-42, 1946-47, 1949, 1951, 1954); Bonds seven times (1990-93, 1995-96, 1998); and Musial four times (1943-44, 1946, 1948). Of course, Williams missed 1943 through 1945 due to World War II, and considering he was the best player the two years prior to the war and the two seasons after everybody returned, he easily could have been the best player another two or three times. Musial missed only 1945 serving in the military.
Those are some statistical arguments, but what about something more subjective? For that, we can turn to MVP voting. A simple method to figure how well a player did in the MVP balloting is called "Award Shares." For example, in 1992 Bonds won the National League MVP with 304 points. If he had been a unanimous choice, Bonds would have received 336 points. We divide 304 into 336, and the 0.90 that results is Bonds' Award Share for 1992. The table below lists the career totals for our three left fielders.
Years AwardShares Rank
Williams 15 6.42 2
Musial 21 7.47 1
Bonds 14 4.83 10
"Years" in the above table includes only those seasons in which the player in question totaled at least 100 games, below which it would be impossible to garner any MVP support at all. Since Williams missed nearly five full seasons while serving in the military, there is little doubt that absent two wars, he would move ahead of Musial. By the way, Musial won three MVP Awards, Bonds has won three and Williams won two.
| ALSO SEE Kurkjian: The Hitter  Giant Step | |||||
