On Monday, Jon Heyman reported Barry Bonds will file a grievance against MLB citing all 30 teams colluded to keep him out of baseball following his 2007 campaign, the year he broke Hank Aaron‘s home run record. In 2008, Bonds’ agent Jeff Borris said Bonds was willing to play for the league minimum or for “free,” donating his salary to purchase tickets for kids.
Two things. First, do all agents have homonym surnames? Second, yeah, MLB probably colluded against Bonds. Players with a 1.045 OPS aren’t easy to find. Take Mike Trout, who led baseball in WAR last year and owned a .377 OBP. For Trout’s OBP to equal Bonds’ .480 OBP from 2008, Trout would have needed to replace 73 of his outs with some combination of hits, walks, and hit-by-pitches. And a .377 OBP is really good! A .480 OBP, even in the more offensive climate of 2007, is ludicrous. By wRC+, Bonds’ 157 mark was the sixth-best for players with 450+ plate appearances. He still brought a ton of value with the bat, even if his defense and baserunning were poor.
Presuming there wasn’t some league-mandated collusion memo (and there might have been!), what if a team took a chance on Bonds? At SB Nation, Grant Brisbee listed the five 2008 teams that stood to benefit the most by employing Bonds. The Angels are one of those teams — even though the club won a franchise record 100 games, they flamed out in the ALDS against Boston.
So, what if the Angels had invested in Bonds? (Sorry.)
Let’s assume Bonds is healthy-ish and doesn’t break down completely in his age-43 season. First, we need to find a position for him to pl — oh wait no, he’s the DH. Bonds couldn’t play in the outfield every day anymore, evident in his -10 defensive runs saved effort in 2007 while serving as San Francisco’s 6-foot-2 lawn dart in left field. Bonds never played first base in his career, but let’s stick him there for a few days when Vladimir Guerrero or Garret Anderson need a day off their feet. We know Bonds will get a few starts in left field, and we know this because Mike Scioscia couldn’t resist letting Raul Ibanez play in the field last year. Some things are worth sacrificing for a .480 OBP. There’s going to be fewer at-bats for Anderson (257 plate appearances as a DH), Guerrero (185), and Juan Rivera (65), but again… 480 OBP. Reggie Willits, Robb Quinlan, Freddy Sandoval, and Sean Rodriguez combining for 26 plate appearances at DH isn’t a thing anymore.
It would have been difficult to improve much on the regular season; 100 wins is 100 wins, after all, and they won the division by 21 games and finished three games ahead of the Rays for the top seed in the American League. Any improvements Bonds brings in the regular season are purely cosmetic. Per Baseball-Reference, the Angels finished eighth in the AL in DH wins above average. A productive Bonds shoots them near the top. The Angels owned a relatively weak Pythagorean record at 88-74, their performance buoyed by Francisco Rodriguez‘ 62 saves and a 31-21 record in one-run games. With Bonds, their run differential inches closer to their actual record and they might reach 105 wins with better production at designated hitter. Cool, but more or less pointless.
For this signing to even make sense for the Angels given all the ::flame emoji:: #HotTakes they surely would deal with all season, Bonds needs to push the club past Boston. In the series, Juan Rivera and Gary Matthews Jr combined to hit 1-for-13 and were worth -0.235 WPA , so Bonds doesn’t have a difficult hurdle to clear. Does Bonds by himself swing two games, or at least swing one of the three losses to force a Game 5? It’s impossible to say, but imaginary Angel Bonds can’t fare any worse than the real-life Angels did. We also can’t rule out the possibility of Bonds tying Scioscia to a chair before the skipper signals for the fateful Game 4 suicide squeeze.
The Barry Bonds experiment gets tricky with personnel decisions. I never mentioned Mark Teixeira, the rental first basemen the Angels acquired in July 2008 for Casey Kotchman. With Bonds, do the Angels find a reason to unload a promising (at the time) young player for a rental when they already have a left-handed masher on the team? Let’s say “no” because I want to follow the white rabbit:
– The Angels never have Mark Teixeira, so their chances of signing him in the first place are diminished. Or the Angels run it back in 2009 with Bonds at DH and let Kotchman and Kendry(s) Morales do their thing at first base. Either way, the Angels aren’t as inclined to chase the Teixeira dragon. These negotiations left a sour taste in Arte Moreno’s mouth, creating the origin story for his issues with Scott Boras, Teixeira’s agent. Boras also represents Adrian Beltre, whom Moreno allegedly gave an ultimatum to sign when he was a free agent prior to the 2011 season even though the Angels were the presumed favorites to sign him and didn’t have any valid back-up plan if Beltre went elsewhere. Beltre and/or Boras balked at the power move, then the desperate Angels traded Mike Napoli for Vernon Wells. NOW let’s wonder if the Angels even bother trying to acquire Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton if they already have Beltre and maybe Napoli in the fold. My brain hurts.
– The Angels lose a compensation pick if they never have Teixeira. The player they took with that pick in the 2009 draft was Mike Trout. The Angels had back-to-back picks in that draft and selected Randal Grichuk before Trout. Eddie Bane, the Angels’ scouting director at the time, claims the Angels had Trout higher on their draft board, so presumably the Angels would have taken him even without the Teixeira pick. That may be the case, but that also sounds like something one would say when there isn’t a difficult decision to be made. There is at least a chance the Angels never select Trout without that Yankee pick.
The moral of this, and every story: baseball is weird, man. Watching Bonds chase 800 dingers for the Angels would have been surreal, and assuming his body held up he would have been a potent addition to the lineup. Everything else, from possible deep October runs to the butterfly effect on the present-day roster, are impossible to project. It is probably best to put the time-traveling toaster down and find solace in a reality where Trout definitely plays for the Angels.
Or, hell, the Angels could call Bonds up today and see if he’s interested in getting a few at-bats. He might be a superior option to Marc Krauss anyway.
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