The Producers

Smash hitters Barry Bonds, who has been on a boffo home run tear for the Giants, and Manny Ramirez, who's packing in the RBIs for the Red Sox, could be ticketed for the record books

By Tom Verducci

Issue date: June 4, 2001

Every so often a story will reach the newspapers about somebody so old, the codger could make even Willard Scott's jaw drop, somebody who remembers those nutty Wright Brothers, horseless carriages and complete games. Actuaries and statisticians have a term for such people. They're outliers. They don't fit into the standard deviation. They render actuarial tables irrelevant. A similar phenomenon can happen in baseball, as in the cases of Barry Bonds and Manny Ramirez, who in two smashing months have sent sabermetricians scrambling for record books.

Bonds, the San Francisco Giants' leftfielder, is hitting home runs at a rate some All-Stars can't match against cupcake-tossing coaches in homer-hitting contests. Through Sunday more than one out of every five balls he had put into play (26 of 112) had gone out of the park. He got to 26 home runs quicker than anybody else in history (in the Giants' 50th game), including Mark McGwire (52nd game) in his record-busting, 70-homer 1998 season. Bonds's sixth of the season, on April 17 off Los Angeles Dodgers righthander Terry Adams, was the 500th of his career.

What makes no apparent sense about this career-best power display is that on July 24 Bonds will turn 37, an age when Mickey Mantle, his closest statistical twin, was finished and most players' best years are well behind them. The average age of the 16 other 500-home run hitters when they belted their career high in homers was 29. Bonds is on track to easily surpass his high of 49 -- set last season. A dizzying run of 11 homers in 10 games that began on May 17 at Pro Player Stadium against the Florida Marlins and continued through Sunday at Pac Bell Park against the Colorado Rockies had opponents describing Bonds as "the best player I've ever seen" (Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones), "the best player in the game" (Marlins outfielder Cliff Floyd) and "a guy that you fear as soon as you see him on deck" (Philadelphia Phillies manager Larry Bowa).

May 30 marked the 15th anniversary of the day Bonds, a wiry leadoff hitter then, broke into the big leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates. That date also was the 29th birthday of Ramirez, the Boston Red Sox DH. Ramirez's production has been so prodigious that he could make a run at two of baseball's most revered milestones: a .400 batting average (last accomplished by Boston's Ted Williams in 1941) and the major league single-season record of 191 runs batted in (set by the Chicago Cubs' Hack Wilson in '30). Ramirez has such a nose for RBIs that when he bats with runners in scoring position, it's like watching Tiger Woods standing over a two-footer. The accolades for Ramirez include "the ultimate RBI guy" (Boston catcher Scott Hatteberg), "the freak" (Boston centerfielder Carl Everett) and "scary, because he's just getting into his prime" (New York Yankees manager Joe Torre).

So what do you call an age-defying power hitter who chokes up on the bat and a hitting savant who bats with his hands slightly spread? They are outliers. These guys are off the charts.

Despite the paces they are on, Bonds and Ramirez reject the notions that they can break, respectively, the home run and RBI records. Bonds even disputes that he has evolved into purely a home run hitter, though his slugging percentage -- a major-league-leading and otherworldly .918 at week's end -- is on the rise for a fourth straight season; he had only 11 singles among his 47 hits this season; he had slugged 41 homers in his past 87 games; and every at bat is an event that keeps even the full-bladdered welded to their seats with excitement.

"Barry is different now," says San Francisco second baseman Jeff Kent. "He's swinging at more pitches and being more aggressive. [Six of Bonds's 26 homers had come on the first pitch of an at bat.] When he goes to the plate, everybody is watching. We all know how hard it is to do what he's doing."

The 6'2" Bonds was listed at 185 pounds when he joined the Pirates. He gained muscle over the years, most noticeably before he arrived at spring training last year, as the result of an intense new off-season strength-training regimen. His 49 home runs last year were three more than his previous career high, set in 1993, his first season in San Francisco after signing as a free agent. The Giants list him at 228 pounds this year.

Many players add power as they age, but this much this late in a career is unusual. Hank Aaron is the only other member of the 500 home run club to hit his career high in homers after age 34. Aaron was 37 when he belted 47 in 1971. McGwire, with 65 in '99 at age 35, is the oldest to hit 50 or more in a season.

Always known for his fast, compact hitting stroke -- no one devours inside fastballs better -- Bonds has lost none of his bat speed while gaining strength. He's a lethal pull hitter who punishes the overshifted defenses he usually faces by driving balls through (and over) them. In the middle of his National League-record nine homers in six consecutive games with at least one homer in each game, Bonds, when asked for an explanation, replied, "Some things I can't understand right now. The balls I used to line off the wall are lining out [of the park]. I can't tell you why. Call God. Ask Him. I try to figure it out, and I can't. So I stopped trying."

In 10 at bats during three games at Atlanta's Turner Field on May 18, 19 and 20, he hit six solo home runs off six counts (0 and 1, 3 and 2, 2 and 0, 3 and 0, 2 and 2, 0 and 0). Six days later Braves righthander Jose Cabrera, who served up the third of those blasts, sounded like an eyewitness to a gruesome car accident filling out a police report: "It's 2 and 0 and I want to try to make the guy hit the ball. But, wow -- I remember it right now -- the sound it made when he hit that ball. I mean, I didn't even have to look back."

Bonds can no longer stake claim to being the best overall player in baseball. He steals only one or two bases a month, and his defense, while still above average, has slipped from his spectacular standard of the mid-1990s. However, by embellishing his career with new levels of hitting excellence, Bonds has earned the right to be called the best player of his generation.

Yes, Bonds is haunted by October, as Dustin Hoffman is by Ishtar. He's a .196 hitter in 97 postseason at bats, with only six RBIs. Through Sunday, though, with 499 fewer regular-season at bats than Mantle, Bonds was approaching the Mick's marks in hits (2,415 for Mantle to 2,204 for Bonds), home runs (536 to 520) and RBIs (1,509 to 1,454) with plenty of baseball ahead of him. How much? That's a question for San Francisco and other clubs to ponder after the season, when Bonds is eligible for free agency. No player has hit more than Aaron's 163 homers after his 37th birthday -- the last 22 of which occurred as a DH. The most for a player past 37 without any at bats as a DH are 130 by Williams.

Should Bonds want a contract longer than three years, he could wind up with an American League team. Otherwise, the Giants would love to have him back. It would likely mean paying him a record amount of money for a 40-year-old, with Dodgers ace righthander Kevin Brown having set the bar at $15 million (for 2005, the seventh and final year of his $105 million contract). Bonds hinted at his long-term plans after hearing of Jones's remark that he could make a run at Aaron's record 755 career homers. "Hell, no," Bonds said with his trademark bluntness. "I promise you from the bottom of my heart, I won't be in the game that long."

Meanwhile, Bonds is making the best salary run for a would-be free-agent hitter since, well, take your pick: Bonds in 1992, one of his three MVP seasons (after which he received a six-year, $43.75 million contract from the Giants), or Ramirez last year, when, as a Cleveland Indian, he became the first player to average more than an RBI per game in consecutive seasons since Joe DiMaggio in 1939 and '40. Well protected in a deep Cleveland lineup, not to mention a smaller, more provincial market, Ramirez accepted the risk of a more intense environment in Boston, not to mention $160 million over eight years.

Ever since Ramirez introduced himself to Red Sox fans by swatting the first pitch he saw at Fenway Park over the Green Monster, he's been treated like a regular at Cheers. What's not to like when he's batting .391, as Ramirez was through Sunday? Famously shy, Ramirez in two months might also have exceeded his eight-season Indians career total in media interviews.

"I wanted to change from how I was in Cleveland," he said last Saturday at Fenway, before a 5-0 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays. "I'm trying to speak more, to be more relaxed and friendly. Sometimes I still do my work -- my hitting -- before I'll talk. But if I come back and the reporters are still here, I'll talk. Why not? It doesn't hurt me."

The 6-foot, 205-pound Ramirez is a dedicated craftsman who takes extra hitting, lifts light weights, jots notes on a small yellow pad while studying videotapes of his at bats and gobbles up an RBI or two like multivitamins. His 56 in 48 games through Sunday led the majors, and his career rate of 0.85 RBI per game is the sixth-best in history. There's no use in asking Ramirez to explain how he does it any more than it was to ask Sinatra how he summoned that voice. It is in his DNA. Ramirez has an RBI gene.

"I don't have a secret," he says. "If I don't drive them in, somebody else will. One thing: I never worry. One situation is more important than another? No. Every situation I approach the same. Hit the ball."

Given how scalding No. 3 hitter Bonds and cleanup man Ramirez have been, the question comes up: Will pitchers keep touching the stove? Neither player has benefited from a hot bat behind him in the lineup. Through Sunday the Giants' cleanup batters ranked 10th in slugging among No. 4 hitters in the National League, while the Red Sox' No. 5 hitters were 12th in the American League. "I think the main reason he's still seeing pitches [with the bases empty] is pride," says Toronto pitching coach Mark Connor of Ramirez. "Pitchers still want to try and get him out."

Bonds deserves credit for exploiting the few hittable pitches he has gotten, says Atlanta righthander John Burkett, who adds, "The way our staff felt was that if you threw him a strike, it was going to be a home run. I'm not a hitter, but I think it would be tough to walk two or three times in a game, not really have any swings, and then all of a sudden, the pitcher throws you a strike and you whack it out of the park. That's pretty impressive concentration."

On May 13 Oakland A's manager Art Howe resorted to a tactic Ramirez and the Boston coaching staff said they had never seen. Unconvinced that his pitcher, righty reliever Jeff Tam, could keep Ramirez in the park, Howe ordered Ramirez intentionally walked with nobody on base and one out in the 10th inning of a tie game. The strategy worked: The Red Sox didn't score in that inning, but Boston won 5-4 in 11 innings.

Similarly, Connor issued a warning to the Blue Jays' pitchers about Ramirez before last weekend's three-game series. "If he comes up in the eighth inning, and we have a two-run lead with the bases loaded," said Connor, "we'll think about walking him."

It was a highly irregular idea, but one that Connor, as the Arizona Diamondbacks' pitching coach, saw manager Buck Showalter use with the bases loaded in the ninth inning of a 1998 game. The batter who provoked such a drastic maneuver? Bonds. That's what happens with outliers. Convention does not apply.

Issue date: June 4, 2001