Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 679: The Barry Bonds Collusion Case

Episode Date: May 18, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Bryce Harper, then talk about what Barry Bonds could have contributed to or cost a baseball team in 2008.

And here's another hit, baby bombs We outta here, baby Good morning and welcome to episode 679 of Effectively Wild, a daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi, Ben, how are you? All right.

I used Play Index today for something simple, but I used it. I used it to find out that currently Bryce Harper is on pace to have more walks than any player since Barry Bonds and more home runs than any player since Barry Bonds. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, it is. Do you think he'll do either of those things? No. Neither do I.

I don't either. But either one is... So 58 homers. Nobody's hit more than 58 homers since Bonds. And I don't think he will. But, I mean, what did Chris Davis hit? Like 53? Chris Davis is not the hitter that Bryce Harper was.

Nope. So, you know, if a guy can do 53, then surely a somewhat better guy can do 54. Yep. Not real likely, but possible. The walks, he's right. If he didn't walk for the next three days Then his on pace would not be historic So I wouldn't expect that either But sure, why not

Which one is more unlikely? They're both very unlikely So what's more likely? That he hits 58 homers Or he walks 150 times? Yeah, I guess they kind of go hand in hand If he keeps hitting at a 58 home run pace He'll get walked a lot. He will but lots of people have hit well

maybe not 58 but people have hit 58 homers and not walked 150 times and People have walked 150 times and not hit 58 homers. So let me I'm using play index here I'm gonna go since like 1995 I just want to get a sense of it because 150, I said 150 is his base. So 150 is extremely rare, but is 148? I don't know. So let's see. After you get past Bonds, you basically have Bonds has all the top spots. Maguire snuck in one time and then you have Bagwell at 149, Sheffield at 142. So really only two non-Bonds players, sorry, only three non-Bonds players in the last 20 years have even managed 140. And of course, it's a tremendously offensive

era. So you would think walks would be up and walks in general are down. It is part of the strategy of the game. It seems to be that pitchers don't walk anybody anymore where it like historic lows. So it would be almost unthinkable to walk 150 times. I mean, Frank Thomas was incredibly dangerous, incredibly scary, and also liked to take a walk to the point that he was criticized for it and never walked more than 136 times. Votto, same thing, never walked more than 135 times. same thing, never walked more than 135 times. Giambi, same sort of thing, never walked more than 137 times. So I would say that if I had

to bet, I would bet on 58 homers before I bet on 150 walks. Okay. Sounds about right. So we talked about whether the corner turning after he hit six homers in three games. Since he hit six homers in three games. Since he hit six homers in three games,

so not counting those games, not counting the best three-game stretch any hitter's had in a long time. Since then, he is hitting 538, 657, 1077. Since then. Since then, he's 14 for 26 With 9 walks And 7 extra base hits Corner turned

He's even getting triples now That's really when you know that the corner is turned Because you're turning a lot of corners Yeah that home run he hit today Sunday was just like a Line drive opposite It was like a He didn't seem to Put all that much effort into it.

It was just lined over the fence in a very casual way. Very casual. And he didn't seem like, he didn't react to it in any significant way. I mean, I didn't think it was gone right away. But yeah, that to me is the classic Harper home run. It's the line drive the other way. And that's kind of the home run that I remember him hitting as a rookie, particularly against velocity, that he would just sort of hit it the other way, low and hard, and it would carry, it would travel, backspin it,

or whatever. I'm going to watch the video so here comes some sound. Harper checks one to left. See you look. Yeah. He sort of I don't know. He doesn't He just sort of looks at it. He doesn't seem to react to it.

You're right. It's an impressive home run for how nonchalant it was all right so bryce harper turned all right uh another update from the thing we've talked about diamond graphs at diamond graphs kevin whittaker has pace of game update uh-huh and the average major league baseball game length is down eight minutes from last year. So there you go. That was the case before, right? Yeah, but it was earlier in the season.

I mean, we were talking about it. We talked about it like four days into the season, right? Yeah. So it's still the case. Yeah, it's still the case. That's the update. Okay. So you have anything to talk about?

I thought we could quickly plug the saber seminar because i like the saber seminar our friend dan brooks organizes or helps organize the sabermetric scouting and science of baseball conference it's in boston august 22nd to 23rd baseball prospectus is one of the sponsors It is my favorite baseball nerd conference of the year. Sadly, I will not be able to attend this summer because of the Stompers season, but I urge everyone else to attend. And tickets are $140. It's, I think, less than half that if you're a student. And 100% of the proceeds go to the Jimmy Fund. So it's a great event in that you'll enjoy going, and it's a great event in that you can feel good about having gone.

So go to SaberSeminar.com if you're interested in buying tickets, and if you're anywhere in the area, you should be. Great. All right. So let's talk about Barry Bonds. Okay. Who is pursuing a collusion case against Major League Baseball. You should be. Great. All right. So let's talk about Barry Bonds. Okay. Who is pursuing a collusion case against Major League Baseball on the grounds that they colluded to keep him out of the game. So on Monday morning at Baseball Perspectives, we have an article by Eugene Friedman, who is a deputy general counsel for a national labor union and sometimes writes wonderfully for us on labor issues and arbitration. They tend to be about arbitration.

And so he wrote about Bond's case. And in particular, he looked at the difference between Bond's case and the collusion case that the players did win in the late 1980s and whether it has any of the same things that made that case winnable. You can read that. I might spoil it as we go. I haven't decided yet. I don't know yet whether I'm going to spoil it. But if I don't, go read it. If I do, go read it. So Ben, let's go back to 2007 when Barry Bonds was not being signed. And he was coming off of a season that is really sort of shocking every time you look at it. It's in a lot of ways, it's, it's almost the, I don't know,

maybe it's not, but it's almost the most shocking season on that line. Maybe it's not, I can't tell. There's some really shocking things on his career record, but to have him have a 480 on base percentage, which I think like three guys in history have ever had a better on base percentage in a season, something like that. To have him do that, first of all, at 42 is insane. And then to just have his career end at that point is also insane. And Joe Sheehan wrote at the time time and we republished this as a wayback article a couple days ago the site but he wrote about how much of the case against bonds

as a player was was sort of faulty that like there was kind of a narrative that oh well sure you can hit uh but he's a terrible defender and his base running will kill you. And in fact, his base running is hardly ever significant enough to kill you, but his base running was not that bad. He would cost you three or four runs a year, which is nothing compared to the 80 he'd put up as a hitter. And his defense wasn't good, but it also wasn't anything historically bad. And it wasn't as though he was unavailable as a defender. He was playing every day for the most part. I think he was 13th in the league in innings in left field

over the final two years of his career. So he was available to stand out there. He had a bad arm, and he wasn't as fast as he was, but there have been worse outfielders than he was. Anyway, half the league used a DH, so those wouldn't have been issues. Joe Sheehan basically said, this is absurd. He dismantled every argument against. If you're worried about the pending litigation against him then or the pending criminal case against him then you just put a clause in that says if he's convicted the contract's void easy enough if you're worried about the yeah joe actually wrote uh something

in his newsletter recently where he basically reiterated that he went back and looked at that bond season to see if there was any reason why bonds would not be valuable to a team or why a team wouldn't benefit from having bonds and reach the same conclusion that there really wasn't. And so what really fascinates me about this, though, is that I wrote not that long ago about bonds, intentional walks, and how one of the amazing things and one of the strangest things about bonds, intentional walkss is that there's been nothing like it since. Nobody has gotten anywhere close to the Bonds treatment, even when there have been great hitters in front of bad hitters like Giancarlo Stanton when his cleanup hitter was Miguel Olivo or whatever the case was,

Greg Dobbs, I think, that year at times, didn't get that treatment. Nobody's gotten anything like that treatment. And it's sort of weird because intentional walks had been going down even before Bonds, and they kept going down. And Bonds alone was this one weird blip where everybody decided to intentionally walk a guy. And that was weird. And of course, everything that Bonds did was weird, obviously, unprecedented and anomalous. But this is another thing that feels so strange that this is like maybe the last time it feels like that a bunch of teams wouldn't sign a guy because he wasn't a good dude or because he was whatever he was, you know, dirty or a cheater or whatever the case may be. Lots of guys who've been busted for steroids since then have been re-signed, have happy

careers, don't get booed, don't get benched, get signed and they play. Some even extremely high profile, you know, almost as high profile as Bonds in Manny Ramirez did keep getting re-signed. We've seen certain teams like in Tampa Bay that seem to have, as we've talked about, almost an apparent strategy of signing guys who are undervalued because of their questionable character or rap sheets. And so like John Bernhardt recently wrote for the Guardian, I think. Is that where he writes in England? He writes for England.

And he wrote about the Artie Moreno, Josh Hamilton situation. And I think we've done the A-Rod situation, I think. But he sort of called it the, he described it as like a sociopath, sociopathy of like corporate behavior, where baseball teams are sort of morally justified to themselves in doing whatever it takes to win. And therefore, it doesn't matter whether they behave like humans at all. And so if your, you know, if your player is not doing well and you can figure out a way to, you know, to void his contract over some questionable, inconsistent stance you want to take toward him, well, sure, you go ahead and do that and the fans

will cheer you. Your fans will actually cheer you for being smart and savvy and all that. And that does seem to be more or less an accepted way that teams behave these days. They do whatever helps them win even if it means sort of behaving in ways that probably the people involved in the team wouldn't necessarily behave as individuals in their own lives, but as a team it's justified. And this did not happen with Bonds. With Bonds, the exact opposite thing happened. And in a sense, it's almost admirable because what I've just described or what Jonathan described as sociopathy didn't happen.

They said, nope, not going to do it. Don't like him for this reason, whatever reason. And we're not going to chase wins if it means getting in bed with that guy. On the one hand, I feel like most people on the internet are pro-Bonds in this case, in this situation, and yet there's something sort of old-fashioned, like that this attitude would not exist anymore like i think that right

now if the same situation were occurring i think bonds would get signed yeah well joe mentioned in his newsletter that that same offseason that bonds was a free agent milton bradley was signed to a one year five million dollar deal and bondsonds was offering to play for league minimum, reportedly, or something close to that. I think it was the year after that Bonds, I think that the first offseason, Bonds wanted to get paid. I think he didn't want to take a pay cut or didn't want to take a big pay cut, and he probably didn't deserve to, but I think he wanted real money.

I think it was the second year that he sort of said, and we don't know if this is true that he would have done this or not, but I think it was the second offseason that he said he'd work for the minimum. Anyway, go ahead. I'm trying to put myself back in the mindset of 2007. I have a hard time remembering exactly what people knew about Bonds and how much general outrage there was. I mean, obviously, there were people upset about him breaking the record, and Bud Selig was not thrilled about him

breaking the record, and he was getting booed all over the place. But was it worse than the general animosity toward A-Rod this year, for instance? And A-Rod has come come back and it's been a complete non-issue as much as some reporters have tried to make it an issue it just hasn't been and maybe bonds wouldn't have been as i don't know ingratiating as a rod has tried to be this year since that wasn't really bonds's thing but i think i don't know would the like joe estimated that he would have been about a three win player that year and seems fair and would a team that brought him back have sacrificed more than that was worth i'm sort of skeptical but i can totally understand why a team wouldn't want that headache even whether it was a principled thing or not.

Just it's a lot of trouble to have Barry Bonds on your team. Yeah, yeah. Well, I could see not wanting to sign him to hit number 756 for me. But once the record is broken, he's not going to re-break it. I mean, I guess literally he would. But I feel like once you survive that day, if everybody lived with him breaking the record,

they'd live with him doing whatever he did for you. A-Rod is a good comp. I mean, on the one hand, yeah, as we've seen, it's gone pretty well. It seems like a lot of people are cheering for A-Rod, and he's playing well, and he's been well-behaved, and it's been good.

On the other, it seems like the Yankees really weren't interested in him being there, and yet he is there, which suggests that the other 29 teams could have had him for a discount and didn't, right? Yeah, maybe. Is that a fair assumption? I mean, if A-Rod weren't on the Yankees right now, they would probably be in much worse shape.

It's not like, I mean, they kind of had a use for him if he was going to be healthy and productive, which wasn't at all clear before spring training, but there was a chance. I mean, they kind of needed him or they needed a healthy him if he was going to be that so i don't know that they would have just given him away and eaten the whole contract okay yeah it's hard to know i that it's yeah it's hard to know because there are so many i feel like there were so many uh fake trades on the internet for

a rod where the assumption was always that you could have him for nothing yeah but the internet didn't know right yeah why would i i don't know maybe it's more of a pr problem if you go after a rod like the yankees were sort of stuck with him i mean they signed him but then all the other stuff came to light after they were already stuck with him so if some other team had gone after him it would have been knowing all the other stuff came to light after they were already stuck with him. So if some other team had gone after him, it would have been knowing all the things that the Yankees didn't know when they signed him. Or, you know, maybe didn't know when they signed him. So maybe that would have made people more angry that they had sought out A-Rod after all that has happened.

Maybe that was part of the reluctance. Do you think there's more uncertainty about how good Bonds would have been than we're giving credit for? Is it conceivable that teams really didn't think that he was a good bet to produce three wins? I don't know. On what basis, though? On one basis is that a lot of his value

came from the walks. I mean, like that 480 on base percentage is misleading right now he slugged 565 in a pitcher's park that's not right yeah he was he was not solely getting walked based on his reputation from previous seasons he was still i mean his ops plus was 169 i mean he was still one of the best hitters i mean that's yeah that's partly the walks but but even without the walks he was pretty good yeah he was projected baseball prospectus 2008 projected him to hit 248 419 478 in 475 plate appearances which was actually a big decline from what he did in 2007, and yet was the 6th highest OBP projection and 77th highest slugging percentage projection

among hitters with at least 300 plate appearances. So it was projecting him to be a top 30 hitter with no value other than that, but still on an AL team, that's valuable. I overstated his on-base percentage a little bit. 480, since World War II, 480 has been topped by Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle and Frank Thomas and Norm Cash.

So four players since World War II had produced an on-base percentage higher than that. Sorry, everybody. I think I said three. It's okay. But yeah, and it feels like, I mean, Pocota, if I had to bet, I don't have any good reason for this,

but it feels like Pocota is going to treat Bonds like a normal 43-year-old. And Pakoda has a very sharp aging curve, steep aging curve at that age. And I just don't feel like anybody actually thought Bonds was a typical 43-year-old. I mean, he had- Clearly not, no. He had done, in every year after he turned 35, he had basically performed at his 99th percentile projection for like seven years in a row other than the one year that he was injured. So it's hard to even think that that Pocota projection, which is really dynamite, but also fairly conservative, representing like a 100 point slugging percentage drop and like a 70-point or 60-point OBP drop,

it's hard to even really think that that captures what Bonds really was. He hit a home run every 12.1 at-bats in that season, which is crazy. Yeah, yeah. All right, so do you think that... We might as well answer it. I don't think we can talk about Bonds without answering this question. Again, we do this every year. What would he hit right now? How old is he? He is 50.

He's been staying in good shape with his cycling. I think Barry Bonds would probably hit, if he had a full spring training and an offseason and everything. I'll give him a year's head start to see the baseball. Okay. I think he hits 200 with like a 320 on base, 350 slugging. Yeah, I think I was more optimistic than you the last time we did this. I'm more pessimistic now. I think I'd go down to like 155, 285, 245. I don't think he'd hit anything.

I think he'd get some Ricky Henderson walks, but I don't think he'd hit. We'll never know. I wish we did. All right. So there's not a lot of factual, there's not a lot of the facts of this case out there right now. We don't know that much about what Bonds thinks he knows. Going back to 2008, his camp was sort of insinuating that they had evidence. And I think the Players Association might have said things along those lines too. We don't really know what those things are, so it's hard to know whether he has a case. Eugene's, sort of the upshot of what Eugene's

conclusion is, is that there were smoking guns in public the first time around, there were clear statements, there was a clear effect and there was a lot to go on. And that here there's not a lot to go on. So it might be true, it might not be, but the simple fact that, well, A, that nothing's out there might suggest that there isn't anything in which to build your case on. But the fact that nothing has gotten out also isn't great. You kind of would think that if there was a conspiracy or if there was any sort of coordination, there's hundreds and hundreds of people in Major League Baseball

who would be aware of it. You'd think someone would have mentioned it to Jeff Passan by now, right? And so the fact that we haven't heard that suggests that there wasn't really any coordinated effort. My guess is that Bonds doesn't have a winner here. Do you agree? I do. It seems like a tough case to prove

because you'd have to find some kind of paper trail or I guess you could find a whistleblower or something. I don't know whether there would have to be documentation in addition to that. But since the first collusion case went against the owners, you'd think that some of the owners were the same or at least would have learned lessons from that first time. So you'd think that they would have been more careful about putting things on paper, documenting things if they were doing this a second time around. I mean, if there were just some casual feeling each other out conversations in a hotel room in the winter meetings or something, that would be a hard thing to prove.

So I'd be surprised if there's just a file sitting somewhere or someone's old email that, you know, will come out that comes from the commissioner's office and says no one signed this guy or something like that. There might have been some kind of subtle pressure applied, but it seems like a tough thing to prove. The thing about it, too, is that in the first case, the collusion was owners trying to save money. In this case, it was not owners trying to save money. This had nothing to do with the owner's financial stake. It was, if anything, it was coordinated retaliation against him.

Or perhaps you could say a coordinated attempt to sort of strengthen the league's image at the expense of one player. I mean, it could very, very easily have been something that violates the CBA. But it's not collusion in the way that the first one was collusion, where the motives are very clear, the labor against capital tension is very obvious. This is sort of a very strange situation where a bunch of basically 30 old men decided that they personally didn't like Barry Bonds and they didn't want him to benefit on their dime. And the question is whether those 30 old men

came to that conclusion independently or not. So it's an odd case regardless. So yeah, my guess is that Barry Bonds loses, but we'll see. Yeah, Joe went through and he looked at all the teams that would have benefited from having Barry Bonds. And there are certainly some that you can look at and say that both that they would have used, they would have benefited from having him and that

they're even the type of team that would do something like that like the right yeah like the eight well the right the a's at the time they had had mike piazza as their dh in 2007 and then they signed emile brown who was coming off a not impressive season and they signed mike sweeney so they were clearly going for the old dh thing neither of those guys worked out and then they signed frank thomas after the blue jays got rid of him in april so they they clearly needed a bonds type hitter and bond was the best bonds type hitter at the time and they didn't sign him and Joe also mentions like the 2007 Mariners who had you know Richie Sexton and Jose Lopez and those were the Jose Vidro DH days so they could have used him and yeah and like the the Diamondbacks had I don't know

Eric Burns and Chad Tracy and left field or like the Mets with Moises Alou. They signed him to a two-year deal prior to 2007 and Bonds couldn't have been much worse than Alou was defensively probably at that point. So there are lots of places that if Bonds had had no baggage, he probably would have made quite a bit of money that offseason on a one-year deal or something. And so was the cloud hanging over him, the legal questions, the moral questions, was that negative 10 million worth of bad baggage? Was it negative 15 million? I guess either every team thought that it was or there was some kind of coordination. But even if there was, I would be surprised if it is proved.

Do you think a team sells one fewer ticket because they signed Barry Bonds? Well, let's assume that they win exactly the same number of games. So even discounting the fact that Bonds might make them more competitive and drive ticket sales that way. Do you think there's anybody out there or, well I guess there's certainly people who are probably likely to go see because they want to see bonds. Are those people outweighed

by pearl clutching ticket buyers who now won't buy tickets? Do you think, I mean seriously, does any person in an entire metropolitan area not give money to a team because of Perry Bonds, do you think? I think there are some individuals who wouldn't have, but yeah, my suspicion is that there are more individuals who would have when they wouldn't have without Bonds. I'm not even convinced there are any individuals. I know there are individuals who would tell a TV reporter

that they would have not paid but I'm not sure that anybody actually would even if you object to it you could be like that Orioles fan who went to the park just so he could stand up and turn his back on A-Rod when A-Rod was hitting

earlier this year yeah you'd make your money back in protest tickets. You'd have people hate watching you. You'd be the Nashville of baseball teams. Your ratings would be incredible. Critics would slam you, but you wouldn't care. Yeah, my girlfriend likes Nashville. Cool.

Yeah, and there wouldn't be any lingering effect, I don't think, right? Like if some team had done that, even if there had been some kind of backlash, then no one would care now. No one would think they were the ones who signed Barry Bonds back then. It wouldn't even be the same people

who did it probably. So it seems like it almost had to have happened for it to make sense, and yet I don't really believe that that will be proved. Brisby's teams that could have used Bonds list, number five, Giants, number four, Angels, number three, Twins, number two, Mets, number one, Rays. He writes of the Rays, the no-brainer choice,

the Rays lost the World Series, and three of their losses came in one-run games. In the first one-run loss, Willie Iays have had DH issues for years. So yeah. All right. Okay. All right. So send us emails, podcast at baseballperspectives.com, Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild,

rate, review, subscribe on iTunes, and support our sponsor, the Play Index, by going to baseballreference.com using the coupon code BP, getting the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription we'll be back tomorrow that was madman my initial reaction was negative maybe I'll change my opinion over time but but between that and the confirmation that Juliana Margulies and Archie Panjabi were not in that scene together physically in the Good Wife finale. I am reeling emotionally.

You care? It's one of the strangest subplots for a show, right? That the two stars are the lead and a supporting actress just had such a falling out, evidently, that they haven't been able to be in the same room for the past three seasons. It's a very strange story that I would love to know the details of, and I'm surprised that we don't know the details of. You're talking to me in your podcast voice. Even though we're not currently in podcast voice. Maybe this will be in the podcast.

Maybe. I found it the same scene at the end. I suspected that they weren't. Yeah, me too. There was something weird about the lighting and the angles and the cuts and everything. But I didn't care because it didn't affect the plot. What's very odd is that it was like what you said for three years that this went on in a way that actually affected the plot. that this went on in a way that actually affected the plot.

I mean, to have her not be in the room with her for three years requires a script to be written around that fact. Yeah, and not good scripts for the most part where she was involved. You didn't like the babysitting... Babysitting bodyguard season? Not so much, no. I didn't hate that as much. I mean, Kalinda's had worse storylines than that one by far so i mean it it's not that i i i enjoyed it that much it's just that there was a tension there you knew that you knew that it was setting something up you knew that there was going to be

yeah something about either her having access or him having her close to him that was going to lead to something very tense and it did to lead to something very tense. And it did. It led to something very tense, in my opinion. Yeah, I could have just skipped to the end of that. Like I sensed that that was coming and in the moment it was not all that interesting, I didn't think.