Federer v Bonds. Unleash the Madness!

I thought I'd introduce our new poster Tim the Enchanter with a little back and forth between us. Enjoy!

Dominant
Main Entry: 1dom·i·nant
Pronunciation: \-nənt\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin dominant-, dominans, present participle of dominari
Date: circa 1532
1 a : commanding, controlling, or prevailing over all others b : very important, powerful, or successful.

See, dominant is easy to define. Basically, to be dominant is to be better than others. To be the most dominant is to be better than anyone else. Simple to explain!

So tonight, we debate a very simple idea: who was more dominant? Barry Bonds, or Roger Federor? It may be a bit hard to nail this down, since Bonds played a team sport and was dependant on a dozen or more other guys each night, whereas Federor played a sports that only rich, white kids get to play. I digress... At any rate, what we’re here to determine tonight is who was the more dominant (in their sport) of the two?

The case for Bonds is simple. He’s the founding, and only, member of the 500-500 club (homers and stolen bases). Nobody else is even in the 400-400 club. He holds the homerun record. He's the only player of our lifetime in the top ten all time in on base percentage. He won 8 gold gloves (yes, they’re somewhat political, but that does remind us that he was great at all things). He has the third highest OPS+ in baseball history (much more telling than simple OPS because it accounts for eras). If you want just single season greatness, he has the three highest single season OPS+ in recorded history. I’m leaving out a ton of statistic here (walks, intentional walks, WAR, win shares). And the fact is, I can ignore that and still argue the case with one statistic: Barry Bonds, media pariah who was snubbed not once, but twice, in the MVP voting (1991, 2000), still won 7. 7 MVP awards. Nobody else has ever won more than 3. Ever.

Barry Bonds is not just the greatest baseball player of our times, and the most dominant of his era, but he is on the short list for greatest ever.

Tim responds
Why is Federer better than Bonds?

First of all, the nature of the sport. Gold gloves and all-star games are political, as are, to a large degree MVP awards, unless you think Derek Jeter is really that good. Yes, Bonds got a ton of acclaim from people who love baseball to death or have at least heard of him over the estimated 1200 men in the pros named “Rodriguez,” and he certainly got pitched around a lot. But was Bonds really that great within his own sport, or just a huge name who never won a championship and benefited from playing against the hilarious “pitching” of the NL west for his entire career? It’s easy to look awesome when the San Diego Padres are issuing walks to you every at bat, but how did he do against the cream of the crop? Baseball isn’t a sport where dregs can win at any given moment, like MMA or football. Baseball’s a sport with punching bags, true mediocrity, cheap owners and politics, and there’s a huge difference between facing Randy Johnson for a couple of seasons versus playing, year in and year out, in a division like the AL East. I will be the first to admit that I’m not one of those people who live and die baseball statistics, but to me I’ve never been sure why OBS, FP, BA, slugging percentage, BOB, WAR, KOK, OB-GYN are used by aficionados to argue endlessly about things, but as far as I know, none of them take divisional talent into account. So Barry’s statistics against the powerhouse rotations of the Colorado Rockies, the Padres and a Dodgers team with fewer playoff wins in a generation than the expansion Tampa Bay Rays are being compared with hitters who go against the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays? That sounds fair. And I’m sure that for those who love VORP, it’s a completely perfect measure of how dominant a player is, which is why every signing in baseball has worked out since its invention. But at the end of the day, to us bemused outsiders, no one asks the big questions about baseball - like why a 50-year old man is essentially guessing whether a pitch goes over the plate in 1/100th of a second with tens of millions of dollars riding on the line. To us, we see these debates as being as relevant as arguing over whether DeGaulle or LeClerc were greater French leaders and citing individual monetary decisions without taking a step back and asking, wait, French leaders?
Finally, there’s the issue of steroids. Sure, a lot of people did them. But not everyone did them, and moreover, “Game of Shadows” proved that Bonds was doing things that no one else had even heard of in quantities that would cause grave concern in cattle. To say “everyone is doing it” isn’t quite as ludicrous as claiming that the everyone was cheating like the Patriots in the NFL, but it still makes the assumption that all of the scrub pitchers that Bonds shelled to define his career had access to the same cutting-edge blood enhancers, masking agents, hormones, diuretics and God knows what else he shot into his ass or gulped down over his career.
Which brings us to his “dominance” counterpart, Roger Federer. Leaving aside the fact that none of his associates are in jail for perjury or obstruction of justice, Federer’s run is far more remarkable given the nature of his sport. Baseball doesn’t put anywhere near the wear and tear on your body that tennis does and most players’ careers are correspondingly over by 30. And even given the normal greater longevity of baseball players, with the crap he has put into his system, Bonds’ numbers are skewed relative to many of those players in the past like Hank Aaron who might also figure into the discussion. Federer, on the other hand, is playing with the same limitations that others in his sport have faced since its inception, and is perhaps worse off given how many more tournaments are played on hard courts how. To put this into perspective, his chief rival, Rafael Nadal, blew out his own body at the age of 25 trying to surpass Federer. Get that? A guy who is six four, 215 lbs and ran a 4.6 forty once as part of an ESPN challenge had his career ended at 25 because the sport took too much out of his body. Contrast that with David Ortiz, who is a serious danger not to make it to first unless he hits a pitch all the way to the wall.
That brings me to another point. Contrary to your assertion, baseball actually draws from a much more limited talent pool. Tennis champions have come from all over the world; with great athletes often getting full rides from patrons to get a chance to compete regardless of their social background. In contrast, baseball players only face opposition from three Asian countries and a third of South America. Bonds himself comes from a far more privileged background than Federer. He grew up in San Carlos, California, a wealthy San Francisco suburb that at the time was over 80% white and had the third highest income of any township in California; with Willie Mays as his godfather and Bobby Bonds as his dad, his family was loaded and connected. Federer, in contrast, was the son of a traveling pharmaceutical salesman and a South African immigrant who grew up in a little tourist-oriented town on the French border.
And he’s gone on to have far greater success at the top levels of his sport than Bonds did at his. He has the most Grand Slam event wins (there are four per year) at 16 and a record 22 appearances, tied the record for consecutive Wimbledon wins. He beats everyone, not just the scrubs – he beat the second best player ever, Sampras, head to head on Sampras’ best surface, beat the fifth best player ever, Agassi, on Agassi’s best surface, and has better than a 2-1 win ratio head to head against every other player past or present on the circuit except the aforementioned Nadal, and he leads Nadal on both hard and grass court surfaces. It is only because Federer has faced Nadal eleven times on clay, Nadal’s best surface and Federer’s worst, that he even has a losing record. It says a lot that Nadal isn’t good enough to get through tournaments that aren’t on his best surface, but Federer can routinely meet him on HIS worst. And that’s another point- Federer shattered the previous record by making the final four in twenty-three straight Grand Slam events, showing consistency across all surfaces, not just in his own ballpark (hint hint). He is the all time leader in Masters Series wins, second in overall Year-End final championships, the all time leader in money won adjusted for inflation, has an Olympic gold medal, and set the all time records both for time spent as the world’s number 1 player (237 weeks) and the winning percentage across all tournaments for a career after the first Grand Slam win (94.3%). No article sums it up better than this one. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/tennis/07/05/federer.by.the.numbers/index.html
And perhaps the best tribute is that paid by the others in the sport. Every player who has ever been ranked number 1 for a span of more than a year has gone on the record as saying he is the best player ever in tennis. Can we say the same about Bonds?

Chris responds

You argue that Bonds didn’t play the best competition, but other than beating an almost washed Sampras, who has Federer played in his career? Who’s his Aggasi? Nadal? The guy who has owned him? And for the record, there’s plenty of pitching in the NL west. Randy Johnson won 4 straight cy youngs there (and Schilling was his buddy). Gagne set a closer mark there. Peavy won a cy young there with SD. I’ll grant the Rockies, but the NL west is underrated, especially in Bonds’ era. The Diamondbacks ended the Yankees dynasty don’t forget.

You argue steroids (even though baseball is a sport with a tradition of cheating. The shot heard around the world? Yeah, the Giants were stealing signs that year…), and then point to Federer’s longetivity. How he’s able to keep going in a sport that nobody else can endure for so long. Ummmm, never mind…

You argue that Federer had more success than Bonds did, but this simply demonstrates your inability to grasp the team concept. If anything, Bonds was a victim of his talent. He made good hitters out of such luminaries as Andy Van Slyke, Bobby Bonilla, Jeff Kent (check his pre-Bonds numbers), JT Snow, and Rich Aurillia. The best pitchers he ever played with were named (in order) Drabek, Nenn, Schmidt. He never played for a truly great team, yet his team made the playoffs countless times and was a game 6 collapse away from winning it all.

See, at the end of the day, Federer is probably the best player there is in tennis. But the argument is there for Nadal in his era. For whatever excuse you want to make for Federer, Nadal has owned him and thus left open the argument. There is no such argument against Bonds. The old timey numbers favor him (homeruns, MVPs, gold gloves) and the newfangled stat-geek numbers love him even more (this graph shows that he was the best by far in the 90’s and the first half of 2000’s, and this graph shows that he was probably the second most valuable player of all time, and could have been the first except for a couple of injuries in 1999 and 2005). And if you want to compare individual awards, then fine. Federer has the most Grand Slams of all time (by 2) in an era when tennis is at it’s weakest, while Bonds won 4 more MVPs than anyone ever. From a press that hates him.

You wrote that Federer’s best achievement is that everyone says he’s the best. Well, everyone likes him. What’s bigger, making people who like you laud you, or making people who hate you laud you? The people who published this and wrote this made him the best player in the league more than double the times anyone else had. Other tennis players respect Federer because they like him. People respect Bonds because they have to. He gave them no other choice.

Tim responds

Okay, in order of your points. How did Bonds do against Randy Johnson? Curt Schilling? A single closer in Gagne in a couple of seasons? Until you have numbers on how Bonds fared against top opposition, merely stating that he faced them doesn’t tell the story any more than saying that the NL west is underrated makes it so. Moreover, those guys were only in the division for a couple of years out of Bonds’ fourteen year tenure with the Giants. That merely furthers my argument that he beat up on most teams’ number three or four guys to make his legend.

I have no idea what your rebuttal to the steroids point means or is trying to say. Yes, baseball has a tradition of cheating. You didn’t address my assertion/point that Bonds cheated more and better. And what was your point about longevity in tennis? I’ll clarify – my point is that tennis careers, even of the best players, are at most around ten to 12 years, and have always been that way. Bonds was hardly an aberration based on his contemporaries by playing for 19 years, but he would have been VERY abnormal in the past. So any records he has in comparison to the past aren’t as relevant as Federer’s records – Bonds had a third again as long as his all-time rivals to hit those marks. And steroids.

And the playoffs mark isn’t that relevant. A team from the NL west has to go to the playoffs every year, and I’ve been over how mediocre the West has been in both the regular season (mediocrity that was confirmed by the division’s poor record in the playoffs. It’s no AL east, or for that matter NL Central). Even worse, the Giants only made the playoffs four times during the fourteen years of the Bonds era, winning a grand total of two games except for that one run. In fact, they won more playoff games in the previous fourteen years. The team, it seemed, was the same both before and after Bonds. That hardly sounds like he made players better.
Federer, on the other hand, has made tennis better, and that’s given that, despite your assertion, he has faced exceptional competition. Andy Roddick has the two fastest tennis serves ever recorded, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. According to available ATP numbers, faults are down, unforced errors are down and average serving speed is up since Federer started winning and, in fact, are better than in other eras of tennis for which relevant stats were recorded. The numbers would suggest (again, not prove, but strongly suggest) that, despite your assertion that tennis is “weak”, it is actually full of better players than it has ever had. It just happens to have the best player it has ever had at the top. It isn’t his fault that he has destroyed potential rivals in a way that Borg was unable to destroy McEnroe or Connors, or Sampras was unable to do to Agassi.

On Nadal versus Federer – again, without numbers on Bonds versus the rare time he faced a good pitcher, we don’t really know if he DIDN’T have a Nadal who caused him trouble. But I tried to explain it as best I could earlier – Nadal’s record against Federer is skewed because they met half the time on clay, the surface Nadal played on from the age of six. That’s like Bonds going up against Randy Johnson every time starting off with a strike and a seven run deficit to try and make up. On other surfaces, Federer wins head to head. Nadal isn’t good enough to make it through tournaments without a different surface backing him up; Federer is.
In fact, Nadal’s almost certain demise as a player is the best tribute to Federer available. I’m not sure how much you know about tennis, but clay slows the ball down dramatically, and in order to play the incredibly mobile defense he was used to against Federer on faster surfaces Nadal pushed his body farther than it could go. In chasing down every ball he could instead of just conceding points, he won the so-called “Greatest Match Ever Played” at Wimbledon in 2008 and outlasted Federer in the Australian Open in January of 2009, but during that time and the proceeding three years he compressed the cartilage in his knee to the point where he missed almost a year of his career, and he is only 23. To recap: Federer’s greatest rival during his run of dominance changed his style to beat Federer for a fifteen months span and in doing so did irreparable damage to his own body and career in the process. Did Randy Johnson ever do anything like that to cope with Bonds?

The arguments against Bonds for the greatest baseball player of the last two decades are few. Love him or hate him, he was a central figure, and had a period of extraordinary performance not matched by another position player for such a long period of time (although the reasons for that longevity are debatable). But is he the most dominant ATHLETE over the last two decades? He won a number of NATIONAL LEAGUE MVPs. The National League, not baseball overall, and the National League has lost World Series by a 2-1 ratio during that time and lost in badly in interleague play, the only other way of measuring which league is better. Sure, diehards will bitch about designated hitter rules affecting NL clubs, but those same journalists who voted Bonds the best player in the National League, as well as league insiders, really aren’t that charged up about the National League on the whole (see here and here for two brief examples). Given the apparent paucity of the NL and the length of his career, the MVP argument weakens. It is, after all, a ceremonial award, not a head to head metric (Nobel Peace Prize, anyone?) and as for the whole THEY HAD TO RESPECT HIM argument making the accomplishment more meaningful, well, I don’t know about that. The MVP is decided by two or three randomly selected union writers in each MLB city, and I don’t know that the BBWA members in Kansas City really had that much personal antipathy towards Bonds. They had heard he was a jerk from other writers, but their job wasn’t to vote for the guy they would most like to hang out with. Their job was to pick the most valuable player in the National League, and when the numbers showed he was the biggest fish in a small pond, my guess is they disinterestedly cast their vote.
To be the most dominant athlete of the last 20 years, Bonds would have to not be up against the greatest player ever in another sport, because, frankly, Bonds isn’t considered the best player ever in his sport. He’s in the discussion, sure, and a lot of people seem to feel that he is top 5 and certainly top 10, but again, part of that comes from career totals that were enhanced by sticking around longer. DiMaggio and Williams went to war. Mantle and Ruth didn’t have steroids or any sort of knowledge of modern training techniques. Gehrig died. Heck, the only other superstar to really have Bonds’ longevity was Hank Aaron, and he came darn close to Bonds in a number of areas despite playing without performance enhancers and with death threats from the Ku Kux Klan. If Bonds was up against the third or fourth best tennis player ever, then yeah, maybe he might be the most dominant athlete in the last 20 years. But Federer is, based on every conceivable number and metric, the greatest player in the history of tennis. And he’s only in the middle of his career.

Chris responds

See, and that’s the problem. You just don’t get it. Baseball is as healthy as it’s ever been, and yet Bonds put up numbers only rivaled by men from decades ago. His WAR numbers from the 90’s, when he was described as “anorexic”, top anything Pujols has ever done. Without steroids, he dominated other abusers. With steroids, he put up numbers nobody has ever done. Nobody has even come close. In every aspect of the game, in total play, Bonds was the best that has ever been since the game integrated. Also, Bonds dominated a sport that matters. He was better than everybody at a time when baseball had more talent than it’s ever had. I've given you two chances and you haven't even tried to mention someone who was a better player than Bonds. That's true dominance. When you are the best in the game, and nobody can even question it. And that's what Bonds was for more than a decade.

The fucking BEST.

And that’s the opposite of Federer. You can point to serve speeds, and whatnot, but that’s simply a product of better athletic training across the board (and that you’d reference Roddick is pretty sad). I played division 3 football with guys who had better 40 times than Jerry Rice. That doesn’t mean we were better. Federer dominates at a time when there just aren’t any good tennis players. I can name more Kansas City Royals than I can male tennis players, and I don’t follow the Royals. Sadly, the truth is, tennis is dying. Check the ratings. 5.71 million people watched Federer win Wimbledon last year (and that was the highest in a decade!). The Spurs-Pistons finals in 2005 was said to be a ratings disaster, but every single game beat that by a million or more people. The lowest total was game 2, which had 6.9 million viewers. Tennis is irrelevant. So it’s only fitting that as it sputters out for a few more decades that someone would emerge to dominate the sport when nobody cares. He’s only as dominate as the guy who always wins pickup basketball down at the YMCA.

I think I erred in picking this topic. Next time, let’s do something truly comparable. Roger Federer versus Diana Taurasi.

You see, at the end of the day, I'm not sure Federer is the best. Maybe he's just lucky that Nadal is injury prone and snakebit on grass. I know that, when they do play, Nadal is the best between them. And that's not dominance. Is Federer the most accomplished tennis player in history? Sure, you bet he is! Is he the greatest? How can he be, when another player owns him so badly?

Federer is great. Federer is accomplished.

Barry Bonds was dominant.