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This is the end of the debate about steroid use in baseball, for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. Or not deserving.
Ballots are due by the end of the month, as their last 10 years of eligibility are up. If Bonds and Clemens don't get at least 75% of the votes, they'll need special permission from a select committee to join legends like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Cy Young, let alone their own superstars.
Bonds would have been a first baseman in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the pitcher would have been a seven-time Cy Young Award winner. Voters decided that the players' relationships with performance enhancing drugs are disqualifying.
We wondered how much their drug use affected their career numbers.
How many home runs would Bonds hit in 2001? He used a mixture of drugs obtained through the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in the first year and smashed the single-season home run record with 73. What about the 2004 season? When he was 42, he went 18-4, struck out 218 batters and posted a 2.98 earned run average, and won his seventh Cy Young Award.
Dan Szymborski is the creator of the ZiPS projection system. The system uses past performance and trends to predict a player's future performance. He was asked to project Bonds' and Clemens' career statistics from the 1999 and 1998 seasons, which are believed to have started using performance enhancing drugs.
The Bonds/Clemens cases look very different when analyzed this way.
Bonds has home runs in his name.
Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001, but according to the projection, he would have hit 23 that year. He used the BALCO formula to hit just 66 homers in the four years that he did it.
Bonds should be on the all-time home run list, according to the experts. The projection has him at It's worth noting that the projection suggests Bonds would have played fewer seasons than he did.
It's on ABC.
Bonds' WAR statistics.
"Barry Bonds" is more important than the home run, but WAR speaks in more powerful ways. The goal of WAR is to give the most complete sense of a player's value to his team, and it's perhaps the best piece of data to compare the greatness of one player to the next. It calculates how many wins a player is worth to his team.
Bonds' career WAR was 164.4, placing him second on the all-time list behind Babe Ruth. In 1993, Bonds' highest WAR for a single season was 10, and that was his only double-digit season. He had four seasons in double digits from 1999 to 2004, the year he turned 40.
The system projects a different path. Bonds has a WAR of 1.7 according to the predictions of the ZiPS. He would have been expected to total 14.2 instead of 47.3 during the four-year BALCO stretch. Bonds' career WAR total is projected to be 128.7, dropping him from second to ninth on the all-time list.
It's on ABC.
Bonds' batting average is above average.
Bonds was one of the game's great players during the first half of his career, when he had seven consecutive seasons of 170 or more hits.
He became unstoppable after he connected with BALCO. He had three of the five highest seasons ever, with an OPS+ of 259, 268, 231 and 263. Bonds has a 182 average OPS+, which is fourth on the all-time career list.
He would have been tied for 30th with his career OPS+ if those cartoonish four seasons had been replaced with 156, 146, 115 and 95.
It's on ABC.
The totals of the win totals of Clemens.
If you predict beyond 1998, you'll see that the deflating effect on his numbers is the same as if he started usingPEDs. The first thing worth noting is that the first thing that is worth noting is that the first thing that is worth noting is that the first thing that is worth noting is that the first thing that is worth noting is that the first thing that is worth noting is that the first thing that is worth He went 18-4 with a 2.98 earned run average and 218 strikeouts in the year when he was 42. The final season would have looked more mundane, with an 8-5, 3.35 ERA, 113 strikeouts, and a 3.35ERA.
In the era of empirical analysis, the relevance of wins and losses has become questionable, but Szymborski believes it's useful in analyzing the numbers. After the date when Brian McNamee testified that he first injected the pitcher with steroids, the pitcher won 141 of his 354 victories. The career total of He would fall from ninth to 24th on the career list.
It's on ABC.
The totals of the pitchers.
The most notable stat is the number of times he has pitched. The numbers show that he was a force well into his 30s and 40s. He had six more seasons with 200 or moreinnings pitched after he turned 35 in 1997 and had a 1.87 earned run average and 185 strikeouts in 2005.
If he reached 200 in his career, he would have reached the all-time record for career appearances, but he would have had fewer career appearances than Frank Tanana.
It's on ABC.
The totals of the WAR of Clemens.
Although his real-life WAR numbers weren't as dramatic as Bonds', he amassed enough powerful numbers over those last 10 seasons of his career to become the all-time leader among pitchers with 133.7, just ahead of Cy Young. He amassed 46 of that total, including nearly 11 during the three seasons he would have been playing.
He would have had a 4.9 in 1998 if he had had an 8.2 in 1998. In the end, he would have had a WAR of 111.3, which would have made him the all-time leader, just below Greg Maddux and above Randy Johnson.
It's on ABC.
What does this mean?
Unlike many other players, Bonds and Clemens seemed to get better as they got older, bucking the slow, steady decline that typically leads to retirement. Bonds had 762 career homers, 2,558 walks, 668 intentional, and a.607 slugging percentage, while Clemens had 888-492-0 888-492-0s, 4,672 strikeouts, and more than 700 games started.
Performance-Enhancing drugs used during the second half of their careers may be a part of the statistics. Bonds began using performance enhancing drugs before the 1999 season. He testified that he injected the pitcher before the 1998 season.
Bonds has said that he didn't know steroids and other performance enhancing drugs were in his system. In 2008 he denied to Congress that he ever took drugs. Bonds was found guilty on one count of obstruction of justice, but the guilty verdict was later overturned, and he was not found guilty in his court case.
Szymborski is the first to admit that his projection system is not an exact science and that the drugs can't account for the large differences between the projections and the players' real, larger-than-life numbers. Modern-day players are in better shape than their predecessors because they work out harder and more consistently. As they recover faster from injuries and benefit from a more scientific approach to the game, players' careers are lasting longer. Many of Bonds and Clemens' opponents usedPEDs as well.
The system has proved to be startlingly accurate. To demonstrate, Szymborski took 139 players who had at least 500 plate appearances in 2015, then compared their real numbers in five categories over the next six seasons to what the projection model spit out. The results were surprising even Szymborski. The "average" miss was about two per season when comparing their real-life home run totals with projected homers. The average miss on batting average was 13 points.
Hall of Fame voters could potentially use all this data to make a decision on Bonds and Clemens. Maybe they would look at the projections to find new justifications for rejecting or admitting the two men. It seems clear that voters who denied Bonds and Clemens entry did not care about numbers. The reported cheating is what it is. This exercise has the potential to reveal what their careers and legacies would have looked like if they'd followed a more predictable path. The weather is a fairly forecastable thing. In this case, the suggestion is that Bonds and Clemens would hold vastly different places in baseball's record book.
John Mastroberardino is a researcher for the sports network.
