Can Win Probability Added Provide Additional Insights into Barry Bonds’ Polarizing Career?

For those of you who aren’t embarrassingly obsessive baseball nerds by night, WPA simply refers to whatever influence your contributions had on your team’s probability of winning a game. For instance, someone who hits a walk-off solo homer in a tie game earns a WPA of approximately 0.5 from that at-bat because his team’s chances of winning rose from approximately 50% to exactly 100%. The pitcher who coughed it up, on the other hand, earns a WPA of approximately -0.5 from that at-bat.

Generally, players who do a lot of good things for their teams have solid WPAs, but occasionally that is not the case. And sometimes you might see total unknowns near the top of the WPA leaderboards. Indeed, WPA is one means of assessing how ‘clutch’ a player has been (or, for your nonbelievers, how lucky he has been). Certainly, given the ups and downs of most baseball seasons, WPA for most players tends to hover around zero even more so than their WAR does. Similarly, league leaders in WPA typically have lower WPAs than WARs. For some context, the image on the right and below this paragraph shows the MLB top 10 in WPAs from 2022. One can clearly appreciate that the correlation with overall performance is strong, but not overwhelmingly strong.

Now, look back at those numbers from the active and all-time WPA leaderboards. If you’re a reasonable person, you may be asking why any of this matters. And truthfully, it matters very little. But here’s my first take-away: Barry Bonds, over the course of his career, contributed nearly as much to his teams’ success as Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera did combined. Sufferin’ succotash!

And here’s my second take-away: the difference in career WPAs between Bonds and Ruth (whom I’ve heard wasn’t half bad) is a pretty big number: 16.25. That’s more than three 2022 Paul Goldschmidt seasons worth of WPA, and Goldschmidt is probably the odds-on favorite to win the National League MVP award. Indeed, the only player in baseball history with career WPA of exactly 16.25 is Ernie Lombardi, a Hall of Fame (HoF) catcher (he’s clearly a generous HoF selection, but not an egregiously generous selection).

We don’t think of Bonds being a “clutch” player because he didn’t really have a defining playoff moment, except perhaps his towering HRs in the 2002 Giants’ WS loss. Moreover, because of his steroid use, we write off his later career success. Yet we don’t give him partial credit for that time period. I’d argue that most great hitters tend to develop better batting skills with age – not necessarily power or speed, but discipline and plate vision. That’s why guys who are able to maintain both health and physique have a lot of later success at the plate (recent examples include Torii Hunter and Nelson Cruz, conveniently both ex-Twins). These days, Barry Bonds is a pseudo-professional cyclist and Iron Man competitor. Let’s give the man credit where credit’s due. He’s no moralistic angel (does anyone believe Babe Ruth was?), but with a bat in his hand he was a god among men. If he hadn’t used steroids, wouldn’t he still have stayed fit? Probably. And wouldn’t his discipline and plate vision have developed along a similar trajectory? Of course it would have. I suspect that Bonds might not have broken Hank Aaron’s home run record, but still would’ve made the 700 club and retired at #1 in career WPA, among the top 3 in career Wins Above Replacement. And he did it all in an integrated era. Were it not for the steroid use, he might even be the consensus greatest player of all time, perhaps on par with Michael Jordan in terms of sports legend status (albeit less than Michael in terms of tongue).

Does that make him the most influential player or the best baseball role model? Of course not. There will always be a space to celebrate the Jackie Robinsons, Hank Aarons, Satchel Paiges, and Roberto Clementes of the world. Their courage and character transcended the game, and perhaps even the notion of fame itself. To argue that the HoF should be about anything other than appreciation of baseball dominance, you’d be taking away from how much those other influences transcended the sport. That doesn’t mean that players suspected of juicing should be held at the same standard as everyone else, but it does mean that they can be given real consideration in a way that doesn’t tarnish the game’s reputation. Indeed, players in almost every era have found ways of bending the rules, so it’s hard to blame steroid users for their competitive energy. Were they greedy? They absolutely were. How much does that make them stand out from the hundreds of talented men already immortalized by plaques lining the HoF? Probably not much at all. Not everyone in Cooperstown’s baseball shrine was a dirtbag, but to my knowledge that has never been a strict reason to exclude someone. And here’s the beauty of the HoF running their own museum. They don’t have to dedicate every exhibit to baseball’s dirtbags. The players with the highest talents-to-likeability ratio needn’t ever be elevated beyond their plaques and stats. We don’t have to morally elevate them to recognize their impressive athletic accomplishments on a slab of metal. And if you want to have a big exhibit about non-juicers, go ahead, Cooperstown. Indeed, a HoF plaque for Bonds can and should coexist with a reasonable degree of honor and fairness, and without cheapening the plaques of others. Except maybe the guy who is an entire Babe Ruth away from Bonds, Ernie Lombardi.