Barry Bonds vs Lebron James

[Shock Defeat]

The basketball equivalent of Bonds imo is peak shaq more than LeBron. Peak shaq was a fearful player that teams would rather foul than let him score. That's the equivalent of teams walking Bonds.

Bonds was the most dominant player and the best player in the MLB.

[mtron929]

Not a baseball fan, but how can this be bonds? I thought ohtani pretty much shattered the ceiling on impact of a single baseball player beyond what bonds was capable of?

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[ShaqAttac]

Bonds may have had the highest peak out of any professional athlete in history. Granted, it was very enhanced. However, there will never be another Bonds.

aren't there multipel better baseball peaks. like trout and babe

You really have to first eliminate all pitchers then eliminate Ruth and say we're going to start when baseball became desegregated to make a case for Bonds having the highest peak in baseball history. Which is fine if you want to do that but it's not the same as what people often say which is that he just had the greatest peak by far of anyone in mlb history. That is not true. Even narrowing it down to only position players since 1950 the main thing that really stands out are his slg/ops. If you use something like war which takes into account defense & games played and adjusts for era he doesn't stand out as much as people tend to think. I think comparing him only to players since 1950 his best war would be like 5th best.

then why is everyone sayin barry here

[oaktownwarriors87]

Right, and my point is you can't compare them 1:1 because they aren't apples to apples. One would need to identify how they are calculated and try to find a distribution of each and compare where Bonds and LeBron end up on a distribution.

FWIW, LeBron has 30% more VORP than Jordan [who is #2 on the List]--and the difference between LeBron and Jordan is larger than the difference between Jordan and #11 David Robinson.

I agree.

And the LeBron number you posted is for career total, not single season. By that standard John Stockton is 30% higher than Kobe and Magic.

Jordan has 6 of the top 10 single seasons. LeBron has 1.

That's the regular season. In the playoffs Lebron has 3 of the top 4 and Jordan doesn't show up until 7. Even in numbers made-up with Jordan as their acid-test in ways designed to ignore Jordan's weaknesses(paint-protection, help, creation quality, ect), Jordan isn't really doing much.

Never mind actual data:

That said...

magic 84-91

...


hakeem 91-97

...

jordan 88-98

Ideally players would be compared for comparable time-frames like so:

Of course, a common knock on Hakeem is his consistency as an RS performer, but even over longer periods, he looks quite good. IIRC, if you use 10-year samples...

Hakeem takes 33-win teams to 48 wins, 15 win lift
Jordan takes 38-win teams to 53.5 wins, 15 win lift
Magic takes 44-win teams to 59

Magic Johnson(3x MVP) 1980-1991
Lakers are +0.8 without, +7.5 with

Micheal Jordan(5x MVP) 1985-1998
Bulls are +1.3 without, +6.1 with

Hakeem(1x MVP) 1985-1999
Rockets are -2.8 without. +2.5 with

By the largest per-game and per-season samples. Jordan isn't even a clear #1 among his contemporaries, never mind a peer for Lebron. Turns out there's more to basketball than made-up formulas

VORP an accumulative stat. Then more games you play the higher it gets.

Jordans VORP per playoff game is 0.1382
LeBrons VORP per playoff game is 0.1255

Jordans peak VORP playoffs of 2.85 he averages 0.1676
LeBrons peak VORP playoffs of 3.40 he averages 0.1545

Everyone gets to play 82 games in the regular season so all is fair. If you miss games then that's on you. Rewarding a player for taking more games to win/lose a series isn't fair.

Playoff stats are also a smaller sample size and the quality of teams you face from year to year can change dramatically. In the regular season we see a more even distribution of competition.

[Cavsfansince84]

then why is everyone sayin barry here

Same reason goat arguments in bb almost always boil down to LeBron and MJ on the gb. Plus this isn't a baseball board so less knowledge on its history than on basketball.

[Colbinii]

I agree.

And the LeBron number you posted is for career total, not single season. By that standard John Stockton is 30% higher than Kobe and Magic.

Jordan has 6 of the top 10 single seasons. LeBron has 1.

That's the regular season. In the playoffs Lebron has 3 of the top 4 and Jordan doesn't show up until 7. Even in numbers made-up with Jordan as their acid-test in ways designed to ignore Jordan's weaknesses(paint-protection, help, creation quality, ect), Jordan isn't really doing much.

Never mind actual data:

That said...

Ideally players would be compared for comparable time-frames like so:

By the largest per-game and per-season samples. Jordan isn't even a clear #1 among his contemporaries, never mind a peer for Lebron. Turns out there's more to basketball than made-up formulas

VORP an accumulative stat. Then more games you play the higher it gets.

Jordans VORP per playoff game is 0.1382
LeBrons VORP per playoff game is 0.1255

Jordans peak VORP playoffs of 2.85 he averages 0.1676
LeBrons peak VORP playoffs of 3.40 he averages 0.1545

Everyone gets to play 82 games in the regular season so all is fair. If you miss games then that's on you. Rewarding a player for taking more games to win/lose a series isn't fair.

Playoff stats are also a smaller sample size and the quality of teams you face from year to year can change dramatically. In the regular season we see a more even distribution of competition.

What are you doing here?

BPM is the rate aspect of VORP. You can simply look at BPM my man.

2009 LeBron PS BPM: 17.5
1991 Jordan PS BPM: 14.6

[oaktownwarriors87]

That's the regular season. In the playoffs Lebron has 3 of the top 4 and Jordan doesn't show up until 7. Even in numbers made-up with Jordan as their acid-test in ways designed to ignore Jordan's weaknesses(paint-protection, help, creation quality, ect), Jordan isn't really doing much.

Never mind actual data:

By the largest per-game and per-season samples. Jordan isn't even a clear #1 among his contemporaries, never mind a peer for Lebron. Turns out there's more to basketball than made-up formulas

VORP an accumulative stat. Then more games you play the higher it gets.

Jordans VORP per playoff game is 0.1382
LeBrons VORP per playoff game is 0.1255

Jordans peak VORP playoffs of 2.85 he averages 0.1676
LeBrons peak VORP playoffs of 3.40 he averages 0.1545

Everyone gets to play 82 games in the regular season so all is fair. If you miss games then that's on you. Rewarding a player for taking more games to win/lose a series isn't fair.

Playoff stats are also a smaller sample size and the quality of teams you face from year to year can change dramatically. In the regular season we see a more even distribution of competition.

What are you doing here?

BPM is the rate aspect of VORP. You can simply look at BPM my man.

2009 LeBron PS BPM: 17.5
1991 Jordan PS BPM: 14.6

https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm2.html

[D.Brasco]

The basketball equivalent of Bonds imo is peak shaq more than LeBron. Peak shaq was a fearful player that teams would rather foul than let him score. That's the equivalent of teams walking Bonds.

Bonds was the most dominant player and the best player in the MLB.

Babe Ruth was probably more intimidating in his time than Bonds.

[ty 4191]

Ignoring the obvious variable here and just answering the question, it’s Bonds. He peaked higher than any athlete in their respective sport. Teams eventually just stopped pitching to him. I’m not sure what the equivalent level of surrender would be in a different sport.

I'm inclined to agree with your assessment, as you say ignoring the clear caveat, I think Bonds was more of an outlier within his sport than LeBron is in his.

But to the implied question of the equivalent of stopping pitching to a guy, which I think is a great one, I'd say it's putting enough defensive pressure on a player that he can't get/keep/shoot the ball. So we could think of walks in baseball as essentially analogous to gravity in basketball. The nature of the impact is very different because of the structure of the game, which is the sort of thing I find fascinating.

This was written before Bonds used steroids and it destroyed his legacy, reputation, and HOF candidacy.


3 ♦ Barry Bonds (1986–2000, 2143 G, 494 1405 .289)

"Certainly the most un-appreciated superstar of my lifetime, Bonds, Biggio, and Henderson the three most unappreciated. Probably the second- or third-best hitter among the 100 listed left fielders (behind Williams and perhaps Musial), probably the third-best baserunner (behind Henderson and Raines), probably the best defensive left fielder. Griffey has always been more popular, but Bonds has been a far, far greater player. The ten best players of the 1990s:

1. Barry Bonds
2. Craig Biggio
3. Frank Thomas
4. Ken Griffey Jr.
5. Jeff Bagwell
6. Rafael Palmeiro
7. Barry Larkin
8. Roberto Alomar
9. Mark McGwire
10. Greg Maddux


Consider this: The number two man, Biggio, is closer in value to the number 10 man than he is to Bonds."


James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (2001) (p. 1365).

(Bonds 1990-1998 may have been the greatest player that ever lived. 181 OPS+ with 8 Gold Gloves and *averaged* 36 HR and 36 SB per season for a 9 year span. Nobody else in baseball history has dominated all around to that extent since perhaps Honus Wagner.)

[SNPA]

The basketball equivalent of Bonds imo is peak shaq more than LeBron. Peak shaq was a fearful player that teams would rather foul than let him score. That's the equivalent of teams walking Bonds.

Bonds was the most dominant player and the best player in the MLB.

Babe Ruth was probably more intimidating in his time than Bonds.

Doubt it. Players watch highlights.

[ty 4191]

The basketball equivalent of Bonds imo is peak shaq more than LeBron. Peak shaq was a fearful player that teams would rather foul than let him score. That's the equivalent of teams walking Bonds.

Bonds was the most dominant player and the best player in the MLB.

Babe Ruth was probably more intimidating in his time than Bonds.

Doubt it. Players watch highlights.

What does this even mean/mean to connote?

[Ol Roy]

Bonds had brilliant pitch recognition and got his swing down to a science. In his younger years, he was also very fast.

Then he bulked up, added elbow armor to crowd the plate, and went supernova.

[SNPA]

Babe Ruth was probably more intimidating in his time than Bonds.

Doubt it. Players watch highlights.

What does this even mean/mean to connote?

How much of Babe Ruth did the average MLB player of his era watch each day? Reading a box score is not as intimidating as watching Bonds highlights every night.

[DCasey91]

Not a baseball fan, but how can this be bonds? I thought ohtani pretty much shattered the ceiling on impact of a single baseball player beyond what bonds was capable of?

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Because with Ohtani it’s harder to capture relative value. In theory he’s the only one that can free solo a whole game (pitches out then swings the homer for game)

For laments terms AROD, Bonds, Judge and Trout had better hitting years but his two way ability is what sets him apart.

But due to health it’s basically impossible to do both at such a high level for a time.

[Franco]

But is Bonds that much more impactful than the average MLB player? The difference in impact between peak Lebron and the average NBA player is far greater. The average NBA player doesn't move the needle for your team at all. Lebron makes you a contender.

To try and quantify it: add the average player to a 20 win team and they win 21 games. Add peak Lebron and they win 55+. Bonds doesn't have a comparable impact relative to an average MLB player. Is he adding a minimum of 35 times more value?

Yeah, you can compare VORP to WAR. I would recommend reading about how both are calculated and what each statistic determines as replacement level.

For Baseball, replacement level is a 43-119 record while in Basketball it's a -2.0 on the VORP scale.

Barry Bond lead the MLB in WAR 11 times and LeBron lead the NBA in VORP 9 times.

Barry Bonds has highest single season offensive WAR of all-time. He has 3 of the 6 highest offensive WARs of all-time (Babe Ruth has the other 3). Lebron only has one season that's top 10 for VORP.

And VORP only goes back 50 years. WAR goes back 130+ years before the MLB started in 1903.

To put it into perspective, in the last 50 years the only baseball player in the top 20 for single season offensive WAR is Barry Bonds. Only looking at the last 50 years his offensive WAR is 20% higher than the next best player, Aaron Judge.

Can you imagine how good an NBA player would have to be to have a VORP 20% higher than Michael Jordan's? That's a huge gap that Bonds created.

LeBron's career VORP is basically 30% higher than MJ's (150.38 Vs 116.05).

[Franco]

Doubt it. Players watch highlights.

What does this even mean/mean to connote?

How much of Babe Ruth did the average MLB player of his era watch each day? Reading a box score is not as intimidating as watching Bonds highlights every night.

I'd wager that, while highlights have a higher effect than "just the box score", facing a guy that has more Home Runs by himself than your entire team is probably more intimidating.

[chrisab123]

aren't there multipel better baseball peaks. like trout and babe

You really have to first eliminate all pitchers then eliminate Ruth and say we're going to start when baseball became desegregated to make a case for Bonds having the highest peak in baseball history. Which is fine if you want to do that but it's not the same as what people often say which is that he just had the greatest peak by far of anyone in mlb history. That is not true. Even narrowing it down to only position players since 1950 the main thing that really stands out are his slg/ops. If you use something like war which takes into account defense & games played and adjusts for era he doesn't stand out as much as people tend to think. I think comparing him only to players since 1950 his best war would be like 5th best.

then why is everyone sayin barry here

Because it got to a cartoonish point with Bonds that opposing managers would rather walk him even with the bases loaded than face him. It was the equivalent of someone passing the ball to LeBron and automatically giving the Lakers a point instead of letting LeBron shoot a 3.

[HeartBreakKid]

HOF does not indicate what "baseball" thinks of Barry Bonds. It indicates what one organization, which is not even owned by the MLB, thinks of Barry Bonds.

Is the hof an institution? Ya. Are the voters really part of that institution? No. Their primary professions are almost all as baseball writers employed by the media in different formats. So him not being in the hof is representative of a group of about 100 people who spent most of their lives covering mlb saying 'no I don't think he belongs in it'. It's about as close to what baseball or the people who make up its caretaking think of him as you could probably get though its obviously due to the ped side of it. So I wouldn't quite say they think so little of him because most would also agree he is a top 15 player of all time but peds are this huge thing that voters don't really know what to do with from that era and they are partly to blame for having such a huge blind spot for it for about 15 years.

For one, those voters come from mainstream media and their media outlets may not want their writers to support a steroid user. That is a fiscal reason not a "baseball" reason.

Two, baseball is conservative and has people in higher positions that are incredibly old - it is disproportionally old and thus younger people are likely under represented in their opinion. 2013 vs 2022 votes support that people are way less harsh on Bonds now than they were 10 years ago.



Three, baseball is "bigger" than what those guys represent. I have been to 6 countries where baseball is more popular there than USA and I can assure you those "100 writers" do not represent any of them, and I can assure you they are very much part of "what baseball thinks".


What baseball thinks of Barry Bonds is that he was a monster player. And I think it would not be very hard to find sources to support that.


The Hall of Fame does not represent what "baseball" thinks. If it were true it wouldn't even be a controversy.

[Cavsfansince84]

For one, those voters come from mainstream media and their media outlets may not want their writers to support a steroid user. That is a fiscal reason not a "baseball" reason.

Two, baseball is conservative and has people in higher positions that are incredibly old - it is disproportionally old and thus younger people are likely under represented in their opinion. 2013 vs 2022 votes support that people are way less harsh on Bonds now than they were 10 years ago.



Three, baseball is "bigger" than what those guys represent. I have been to 6 countries where baseball is more popular there than USA and I can assure you those "100 writers" do not represent any of them, and I can assure you they are very much part of "what baseball thinks".


What baseball thinks of Barry Bonds is that he was a monster player. And I think it would not be very hard to find sources to support that.


The Hall of Fame does not represent what "baseball" thinks. If it were true it wouldn't even be a controversy.

I don't buy into whenever I see people on internet forums talking about other people being old or "incredibly old" as a way to discredit their opinions and whatnot. It's traditional in society going back thousands of years for older people to decide stuff for it. I mean idk how old you are but you're probably talking about people in the 40-70 age range which to me isn't that old. People under the age of 35 aren't even going to remember Bonds that well or his place within mlb history. I also already mentioned above that nearly any writer would have him as a top 10-15 player of all time. Saying they can't vote for him due to ped use and their employer not liking them doing that is also mainly conjecture imo. Plenty of voters have started voting for players that are thought to be have used. I don't think it's some conspiracy at this point to keep them out so much as its just a source of shame for both mlb and the writers who sort of looked the other way at that time.