Barry Bonds - Guilty of Obstruction

[SP33Demon]

"Yes, there is more to baseball than swinging a bat but please tell me any great hitter that cannot bat .300 except Bonds? Yes, he had great power but let's not confuse a tuna with a shark."

Do you not read what you write? Hilarious.

Ken Griffey Jr was not a great pure hitter nor Mantle. They were great sluggers, just like Bonds. Definition of a slugger? Someone who hits with power when they make contact. Don't confuse it with a great pure hitter. Jim Thome is a slugger. Mcgwire. Bautista.

Mays batted .304 without the help of steroids, Bonds experienced a 51 point swing in 5 years on the juice and couldn't even catch his Godfather. Mays was a great hitter, but not as great as Ted Williams, Stan Musial, or the Babe. Joltin' Joe Dimaggio puts ups a great argument to be included as well, definitely better overall hitter than Mays and Mantle... he could hit for power and average just like Teddy Ballgame, the Babe, Stan the Man, and Albert the Machine.

You still didn't answer my question: do you think Bonds/McGwire is as good a pure hitter as Tony Gwynn or Wade Boggs? Do you think that Gwynn/Boggs were as good a slugger as Bonds/Mcgwire? Now how does Pujols compare to both categories? Like I said, tuna:shark.

 

[preslove]

Actually, good find. For whatever reason, Paige wasn't listed as a HOFer off the reference I was looking at, he actually faced Ted Williams for 5 years.

I'll look up how badly Ted Williams destroyed him as well. By the way, Ted Williams was a part of the Golden age that you speak of. 😉

Paige was 42 when he entered the majors...

 

[IAteYourMother]

Ken Griffey Jr was not a great pure hitter nor Mantle. They were great sluggers, just like Bonds. Definition of a slugger? Someone who hits with power when they make contact. Don't confuse it with a great pure hitter. Jim Thome is a slugger. Mcgwire. Bautista.

Mays batted .304 without the help of steroids, Bonds experienced a 51 point swing in 5 years on the juice and couldn't even catch his Godfather. Mays was a great hitter, but not as great as Ted Williams, Stan Musial, or the Babe.

OHHHH ok, so Juan Pierre was a better pure hitter than Griffey, got it.

I can agree with Griffey, Bonds, Mays, Robinson not being pure hitters like Williams and Boggs, but the whole point of your post was debating who was a better HITTER (which by the way, is far more useful as a qualitative statement than pure hitter, because it takes into account all aspects of the art of hitting)

Still, to not call Bonds, Mays, Griffey pure hitters is also stupid. Perhaps not in the top 10 class of pure hitters, but still pure hitters nonetheless. Even without looking at their stats, their swings are just beautiful.

 

[IAteYourMother]

Articles I don't necessarily completely agree with, but discuss differences and rank the best pure hitters versus the greatest hitters. I think I'd rather be on the list of greatest hitters.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/joe_posnanski/10/17/pure.hitters/index.html

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/joe_posnanski/10/14/best.hitters/index.html

Oh by the way, I never even tried to argue your point on Pujols. He's definitely on path to become one of the greatest players of all time, if not the best. Of course, longevity in a career is crucial to reaching that point, but even now I would say he's a HOFer. But please, if you're going to make blanket posts make sure you differentiate between pure hitting and great hitting a little more, yeah?

 

[SP33Demon]

OHHHH ok, so Juan Pierre was a better pure hitter than Griffey, got it.

I can agree with Griffey, Bonds, Mays, Robinson not being pure hitters like Williams and Boggs, but the whole point of your post was debating who was a better HITTER (which by the way, is far more useful as a qualitative statement than pure hitter, because it takes into account all aspects of the art of hitting)

Still, to not call Bonds, Mays, Griffey pure hitters is also stupid. Perhaps not in the top 10 class of pure hitters, but still pure hitters nonetheless. Even without looking at their stats, their swings are just beautiful.

The best hitters hit for average AND power. Bonds, at .288 before steroids and even .298 after, does not fall into the best hitter category. Mays, of course he does, I never said Mays wasn't a great hitter. Does Mays make my top 5? No. Griffey, for all intents and purposes, was not a great pure hitter.

How many times did either Griffey or Bonds or Mantle get more than 185 hits in their career? None. Musial, 10 times. Gehrig, 9. Mays, 7 times (two times after expansion). Dimaggio, 6. Pujols, 6. Babe, 6. Williams, 4. All of them minus Pujols did it in 8 less games, too (expansion of 154 game schedule until 1961/62). These guys all racked up hits at a higher rate than Bonds/Griffey/Mantle could only dream about, while possessing the same or close slugger ability.

Yes, I probably should have been more specific about "slugger/power hitter + great pure hitter" = best hitter. I can see what you mean.

From your links, top 10, I don't agree with Ty Cobb or Rogers Hornsby because they were such great pure hitters. A lot of their OPS is attribute to singles going towards their SLG%. They really didn't hit homeruns at the rate Babe Ruth and Gehrig did; those two are more of the Ichiro prototype... massive amounts of hits. But I think you have to be a constant homerun threat to fit into my top 10.

Jimmie Fox and Hank Aaron, how did I forget those two! Wow, totally overlooked them.

My top 9 would be:
Willie Mays, Albert Pujols, Joe Dimaggio, Hank Aaron, Jimmie Fox, Stan Musial, Lou Gehrig, The Babe, Ted Williams. Bonds and Manny would be in the discussion had they not taken roids.

One sleeper pick is Vladimir Guerrero. If he has 3 or 4 more good offensive seasons keeping his average and power (.300~, .800~OPS), he could make my top 10... however, has been declining fast. I imagine that Vlad will finish with a similar line to Piazza: .308, .922+. Right now he's at .319/.944. Both were amazing. I'm also tempted to put Chipper Jones in as well, both are very close to 450 HR's and have great average + OPS. Their tier of production has certainly been amazing.

Also, haven't heard anything about either of them on steroids but I guess it's normal for a 36/38yr old to start dropping off if they're not on the juice!

 

[classy]

Mike Schmidt never took them, stop lying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enGnm9NsxD0

Bonds never swung at bad pitches? Then why did he bat only .288 in his first 13 years? You make no sense, stop drinking the Bonds Kool Aid.

No Kool Aid, you are just delusional.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/sports/baseball/28chass.html

Amphetamines "have been around the game forever," the Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt writes in his new book, "Clearing the Bases," which HarperCollins will publish next month. "In my day," he says, they "were widely available in major-league clubhouses."

That Major League Baseball chooses to act against amphetamines in 2006 is farcical. You almost have to cover your face when you snicker at the thought.

"They were obtainable with a prescription," Schmidt writes, "but be under no illusion that the name on the bottle always coincided with the name of the player taking them before game time."

The pills energized players, helped get them through a tough series of games, a 162-game schedule played in 182 days. The only thing a player had to do was make sure he didn't take a pill prematurely. Players like to tell of teammates who took pills before games, then had the games rained out and spent the rest of the night climbing walls.

Schmidt doesn't acknowledge in the book that he used greenies, but in a telephone interview Sunday, he said, "A couple times in my career I bit on it."

He added: "There were a few times in my career when I felt I needed help to get in there. I'm a victim; I admit to it. I'm not incriminating myself or players I played with to say we were on amphetamines our entire careers. I just wanted to see what they would do. It was a lack of willpower. You had an impressionable young kid, and someone says, 'Man you want to feel good?' If I had to do it over, I probably wouldn't do it. You can't put a 56-year-old head on a 28-year-old kid."

I am from the Philly area and grew up during Mike's career.

 

[SP33Demon]

I am from the Philly area and grew up during Mike's career.

And so did I, but I'm not dense enough to think a stimulant (like caffeine or a greenie) will allow a player like Schmidt to pack on 30 lbs of muscle. Pete Rose took greenies too, do people say he took "steroids"? No, that's ridiculous.

How about Willie Mays?

During the Pittsburgh drug trials in the mid-1980s, outfielder John Milner testified that Willie Mays introduced him to a liquid amphetamine known as "red juice." More than a decade later, Tony Gwynn spoke of rampant amphetamine use in the game, and David Wells referred to greenies in his book, "Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball."

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=crasnick_jerry&id=2289509