If A-Rod Were Healthy

In the summer of 2007, I was between my junior and senior years of high school. At the time, I was working at a small theatre, and there is a shift I can still vividly remember. In early August, I was working the concessions counter with a younger kid that I'd known for years and happened to play minor ball. Now, this being a small Canadian town, there was no baseball talk to be had, not even with people that played the game, so I was enthused when my coworker turned to me and said, "Barry Bonds broke the record last night."

"Yeah, I saw it live. Pretty cool."

"Mm."

Now, this is exhilarating dialogue, I know, but what comes next is relevant. I promise.

"What do you think?" I asked, "Is he the true home run king?"

He shrugged, "It doesn't matter. A-Rod is going to beat it in a couple of years."

***

On that night, August 10, 2007, Alex Rodriguez, 31 years of age, possibly the greatest player of the last 15 years and as-of-yet clean-nosed in the age of steroids, was sitting on 37 home runs for the season and was in the news for recently hitting number 500 for his career. His April (14 HR, 1.297 OPS) had reminded everyone how great he was, and this was only reinforced when he ended up with 54 home runs and won the AL MVP Award in a landslide. He signed a ten-year deal with the Yankees that included incentives, based on him hitting 763 home runs, that drove its value to $300 million. A-Rod didn't have a shot at the home run record; he was going to break the home run record.

The ensuing years have brought disappointment for us all - he's averaged 124 games and 25 home runs in the years since that historic season. Now 37, he has had repeated injuries to his legs - his 2011 was cut short by knee surgery, and he will be out until July 2013 after work on his right hip. He has five years left on that deal, though it is unclear whether he will be able to finish the contract out, and he needs 116 home runs to beat Bonds. Unable to hit 20 home runs since 2010, we aren't sure if Bonds can rest easy or not at 762. 

But what if he hadn't gotten hurt? What if Rodriguez had managed to stay healthy through his 30s? What if, to paraphrase a friend, we hadn't been robbed of the chance to see the record broken because human knees suck?

To do so, we need to find two things: How many games A-Rod would play through the end of his contract, and how many home runs he would hit. Now, A-Rod really fell off the cliff after 2010, and at that time, he was playing in about 142 games per season, averaging back to 2006, or about 526 at-bats. Additionally, using Bill James' Favorite Toy metric, we can figure that he was hitting one home run per 16.1 ABs at that point (going back to 2008).  

This indicates that from 2011-2017, A-Rod would be averaging 33 home runs per season. He was at 613 at the end of 2010, so this gives us a staggering 844 home runs. But not quite. If you average out every season going back to 1920, players peak in terms of home run power in their mid-30s, and drop off after that. If A-Rod's power declined at a MLB-normal rate, he would end up with HR totals of:

2011: 33

2012: 33

2013: 33

2014: 30

2015: 28

2016: 25

2017: 18

This adds up to exactly 200 home runs. So, even factoring the aging process, Rodriguez would still end up at 813 home runs, exactly 50 more than Bonds and the clear home run king of baseball.

As it is, Rodriguez is at 647 with the end clearly in sight - even if he plays the next five seasons, there is no guarantee he will ever hit double-digits in home runs again.

What if they pitched to Bonds?

In his Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James addresses a fun scenario: What if Babe Ruth was surrounded by the worst team ever fielded - would it be worth it to walk him every time and deal with the rest of that horrid lineup? The results showed that even in this situation, walking the Babe all the time was a bad idea - the team scored something like 50 runs more when Ruth had a .000/1.000/.000 line. The hitter behind him hit .250 with 9 home runs and drove in 151 runs. The point is, walking guys is bad, m'kay?

This got me thinking about Barry Bonds and the early '00s, when he walked all the damn time, so I wondered how much opposing teams helped the Giants by walking him so much.

This article makes one huge assumption: that the walks Bonds took during his roiding years were all respect walks, from pitchers afraid to pitch to him. Given that his intentional walks jumped about 150%, and considering the reputation at the time (they pitched around him at the 2004 Home Run Derby), I don't think it's unfair to assume the vast majority of his walks were walks that he would not have gotten earlier in his career.

But, first things first: how much more did Bonds walk in his later years? Well, from his last year in Pittsburgh, 1992, through 1997, Bonds walked 19.6% of the time. Once he started juicing and GOATing hard from 2001-04, he walked in an insane 30.9% of his plate appearances. So, this article is going to assume that 11.3% of his plate appearances were simply forfeited by pitchers afraid to pitch to him.

This is where it gets interesting. I used Tom Tango's event values to find out how much Bonds was worth during this time (2001-04): with all of the walks, and everything as it actually happened, Barry Bonds created about 708 runs over the four years, or 191.5 runs per 155 games (yep).

Now, we take out those 'respect' walks, distributing them appropriately into all other outcomes. After removing the extra walks, we got an extra 300 events over the four years to put into things like home runs, doubles, and, most importantly, outs.

What I got was that Bonds created approximately 700 runs from 2001-04, or about 189 per 155 games. Not only was intentionally walking Bonds not helping, it actually hurt a bit, especially given one consideration:

A walk and an intentional walk are not the same thing. The former is worth 0.32 runs, the latter 0.18. The IBB is worth less because of situation - they are issued to set up double plays, when there is a runner in scoring position, etc. The walks issued to Bonds were worth more, because they were in atypical IBB situations; he was famously walked by Buck Showalter in 1998 with the bases loaded - that move was obviously worth more than 0.18 runs. Bonds probably made several runs per year based on the difference in his intentional walks. 

So,  no, the difference isn't as shocking as James's example with Ruth, but we're not talking about walking every time with scrubs surrounding him, either. In short - don't walk guys more than you have to.