Athletes - Barry Bonds

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	Athletes - Barry Bonds

Barry Lamar Bonds (born July 24 1964 in Riverside, California) is a left fielder in Major League Baseball for the San Francisco Giants; he is most famous for his home run hitting, and is notorious for his alleged involvement with performance enhancing drugs. He holds the record for most home runs in a single season with 73 and is currently third on the all-time career list with 708, trailing only Babe Ruth (714) and Hank Aaron (755).

Bonds is generally considered to be among the greatest players of all time, and has won a record seven MVP awards over the course of his career; for those who view baseball through the prism of sabermetrics, Bonds, along with Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, is typically regarded as one of the top three hitters in the history of the game. He is the only player in baseball history to have hit at least 500 home runs and stolen at least 500 bases. Additionally, Bonds has won eight Gold Glove Awards for his defensive prowess in left field. However, he is the focus of a raging debate in the baseball world, centering on two questions: has he had help in the form of illegal performance-improving drugs, and if so, to what degree, if any, does the use of these drugs account for his accomplishments? This debate has been further fueled by reports of testimony given in the investigation of the BALCO scandal. In March 2006, Sports Illustrated published an excerpt from Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru Wada's conspiracy theory book "Game of Shadows", alleging that Bonds has used steroids frequently since 1998.

Background

The son of former All-Star Bobby Bonds, Barry Bonds graduated in 1983 from Junipero Serra High School (San Mateo, Calif.), excelling in baseball, basketball and football. Although Barry was originally drafted by the San Francisco Giants (the team with which he would later star), Bonds chose to go to college first, playing baseball at Arizona State University and earning a degree in Criminology. He began his major league career in 1986 with the Pittsburgh Pirates, who selected him with the 6th overall pick in the 1985 draft. In 1993, Bonds left the Pirates to sign a lucrative free agent contract (worth a then-record $43.75 million over six years) with the Giants, for whom his father had played over the first seven years of his career. Bonds' uncanny combination of speed and power in the early and middle stages of his career recalled his father's abilities, though it is generally held that Barry is an even more talented player than Bobby was. In addition to his famous father, Bonds has an outstanding athletic pedigree: Baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays is his godfather; Reggie Jackson, another Hall of Famer, is his distant cousin. His aunt, Rosie Bonds, finished 8th in the Women's 80-meter hurdles (Extended to 100-meter hurdles in 1971) at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan.

Achievements

In Sports Illustrated (June 5, 2000), San Francisco Giant Shawon Dunston said of his teammate Bonds, "He's not going to hit 70 homers, but he believes he can. That's frightening." The next year, Bonds set the single-season home run record, hitting 73 to break Mark McGwire's 70-homer mark set in 1998. Some analysts consider Bonds' 2001 performance among the greatest hitting seasons in history; besides the home run record, he set single-season marks for walks (177) and slugging percentage (.863) (topping Ruth's records of 170 and .847, set in 1923 and 1920, respectively). In 2002, Bonds did not repeat his 73-homer feat, belting only 46 long balls (still good enough for second place in the National League), but there were mitigating circumstances, mainly the fact that teams were willing to walk him rather than give him good pitches to hit. Partly because pitchers tried to "pitch around" him whenever possible, he bettered his own record for walks with 198, which contributed greatly to a .582 on-base percentage, breaking Williams' 1941 record of .551. He also won the National League batting title with a .370 average, becoming the oldest player to win the honor for the first time. In 2004, he won his second batting title with a .362 average. He also broke two of his own records: OPS, with 1.422, and on-base percentage, with a staggering .609 mark -- the only time a player has bettered .600 over a full season. Bonds has been voted the National League's Most Valuable Player a record seven times: in 1990, 1992, 1993, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. He is the first player in baseball history to be named MVP in three (much less four) consecutive years, and no other player has won the award more than three times. He also finished second in the voting for the award on two occasions: in 1991, to Terry Pendleton of the Atlanta Braves; and in 2000, to then-teammate Jeff Kent. During the 2002 season, Bonds became the fourth man to hit 600 career home runs, and he also set the record for most home runs hit in a single post-season (8). The Giants lost the World Series that year to the Anaheim Angels, four games to three. Bonds' 8 Gold Glove awards as an outfielder are the third-most ever for that position. He has been named to 13 National League All-Star teams, in 1990, 1992-1998, and 2000-2004. Bonds became the first 400-400 player (400 home runs and 400 stolen bases) on August 23, 1998, when he hit home run number 400 off of Florida's Kirt Ojala. He had stolen his 400th base on July 26, 1997 against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Candlestick Park. On June 23 2003, Bonds recorded his 500th stolen base in the eleventh inning of a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Pacific Bell Park. Bonds later scored the winning run. By chance, his ailing father Bobby was in attendance that night. With 633 career home runs at the time, Bonds became the first 500-500 player in baseball history, already the only member of the 400-400 club. Additionally, in 1996 Bonds became the second of the three current members of the so-called "40-40 club", signifying 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in one season. The other two members are José Canseco and Alex Rodriguez. Bonds is among the many power hitters of recent vintage who "crowd the plate", standing in such a way that his body is almost over the plate (and thus closer to the strike zone, allowing his bat to cover more of the plate when he swings). In 2001, because of Bonds and others like Mo Vaughn (each of whom wear large padded elbow protectors when batting), Major League Baseball instructed umpires to call a slightly different strike zone, calling more high inside pitches strikes. The new regulations also banned hitters from using hard protective gear apart from helmets (e.g., hard elbow or chest guards), which enabled them to get closer to the plate. MLB officials ruled, however, that Bonds could continue to sport his own particular elbow guard, due to medical reasons. On April 12, 2004, Bonds hit his 660th home run, tying him with his godfather Willie Mays for 3rd on the all-time career home run list in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers at SBC Park. Larry Ellison (not the CEO of Oracle Corporation) caught the home run and returned it to Barry. He hit his 661st home run at the same venue the next day, April 13, placing him in outright third behind Babe Ruth (714) and Hank Aaron (755). Ellison also caught number 661, but kept it for himself with Barry's blessing. (Ellison was in a kayak in McCovey Cove, an arm of San Francisco Bay that lies behind the right-field stands at SBC Park, so this wasn't quite the amazing coincidence it appears at first sight.) On July 4, 2004, Bonds passed Rickey Henderson to take the all-time lead in career walks, drawing his 2191st free pass. Later in 2004, he broke his own single-season record for walks, becoming the first player with over 200 in a season and ending the season with 232. His total of 232 walks was 105 more than the next closest leader, Lance Berkman, Todd Helton, and Bobby Abreu who all had 127. Included in Bonds' 2004 total were 120 intentional walks, the most issued since MLB began recording them separately in 1954. Bonds also has the 2nd- and 3rd-highest single-season intentional walk totals, with 68 in 2002 and 61 in 2003. He has been the league leader in the category for 13 of the past 14 seasons. Oddly, though, he did not lead in 2001, when he hit a record 73 home runs, finishing with 35. Sammy Sosa led the NL with 37. Bonds holds almost every major league record in existence for intentional walks: four in a nine-inning game (2004), 120 in a season (2004) and 604 in his career (more than the next two players on the all-time list, Hank Aaron and Willie McCovey, combined). Bonds is an easy candidate for the intentional walk, though some have argued that his opponents' obsession with pitching around him borders on the irrational. Still, the Giants have afforded Bonds little in the way of lineup "protection" in recent years, making the incentive to issue him a free pass even greater. In the first month of the 2004 season, Bonds drew 43 walks, 22 of them intentional. He broke his previous record of 68 intentional walks, set in 2002, on July 10, 2004 in his last appearance before the All-Star break. On May 28, 1998, Bonds became one of only four players in major league history to be intentionally walked with the bases loaded, when the Arizona Diamondbacks elected to give up a run and face catcher Brent Mayne instead. On September 17, 2004, Bonds hit his 700th home run off San Diego Padres pitcher Jake Peavy in San Francisco and became only the third man to achieve the 700 home run plateau.

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Athletes - Barry Bonds

Background

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