Rating Barry Bonds as an expansion-era left fielder

Unless you penalize him for steroid use, there’s no debate about who’s the most valuable left fielder of the Expansion Era. Barry Bonds is the obvious runaway choice.

MLB Network personalities Brian Kenny and Bob Costas split on that premise during the fourth installment of the network’s Top 10 Right Now Tuesday. That episode included a segment on picking the best post-1969 left fielder Monday.

Costas went with the data, placing Bonds first. Kenny slotted Bonds fourth, suggesting that his ranking was based largely or purely on the player’s pre-steroid years. He had Carl Yastrzemski, Rickey Henderson and Pete Rose in the first through third slots.

As will be demonstrated below, Bonds’ on-field credentials as the best left fielder of the expansion era are simply beyond comparison. So the real debate focuses on how much of his record, if any, to consider.

First, here are the respective top 10s of Kenny and Costas:

Given the fundamentally offensive nature of the position, our five criteria for ranking a left fielder are heavily weighted toward that aspect of their games. Save for Rose, who was included by MLB Top 10 Right Now even though he played more games at first base than as a left fielder, the players we’ve assessed played more games at left field than any other position.

Each has received an ordinal score equal to their rank in each of the criteria.

Alphabetically, the 30 nominees are:  Moises Alou, Dusty Baker, George Bell, Albert Belle, Barry Bonds, Ryan Braun, Lou Brock, Yoenis Cespedes, Vince Coleman, Jose Cruz, George Foster, Juan Gonzalez, Luis Gonzalez, Mike Greenwell, Rickey Henderson, Matt Holliday, Carlos Lee, Greg Luzinski, Kevin Mitchell, Marcell Ozuna, Tim Raines, Manny Ramirez, Jim Rice, Pete Rose, Joe Rudi, Lonnie Smith, Alfonso Soriano, Billy Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and Christian Yelich.

When all five categories are assessed, the player with the average ordinal score closest to a perfect rating of 1.0 is the winner.

The criteria:

1. Five-year peak performance with OPS+ as the yardstick;
2. Cumulative OPS+ over the course of their careers;
3. Career MVP shares;
4. Career Defensive Wins Above Replacement;
5. Career baserunning runs.

MLB Expansion-era left fielders: 5-season peak performance

This criteria is simply the player’s best average OPS+ over five consecutive seasons.

Here are the 10 best peak averages among the 30 candidates.

Bonds’ margin of superiority in this category defines the breath of his overall dominance. The 68.2 point margin between him and Ramirez in the runner-up spot is greater than the margin between Ramirez and the player in the 30th position on this list, Vince Coleman.

The real battle, then, is to see who ranks highest among the leading candidates for the runner-up spot as a left fielder, those being Hall of Famers Yastrzemski, Henderson, Raines and Rice.

Of those, Yastrzemski gets the biggest boost out of this category, in part due to his exceptional 1967 season. Technically that Triple Crown/MVP year pre-dates the expansion era, but it is part of Yaz’s 1967-71 five-season peak, the bulk of which is within the expansion era.

Another technicality: At 158.3, Yaz actually had a higher five-season peak between 1966 and 1970, but the majority of that period lays outside the expansion era, so it doesn’t count. It would not have impacted his ordinal rank anyway.

For a 14-season block between 1980 and 1993, Henderson never registered an OPS+ below 120. His best came at the end of that string, 1989-93, averaging 151.8. As strong as that sounds, six left fielders beat it. As previously noted, left field is a position emphasizing offense.

This was not an exceptionally strong category for either Raines or Rice. Raines finished 12th in the category, averaging 142.4 between 1983 and 1987. That trailed Williams by a point and a half and Christian Yelich by less than a point. With a 140.0 average between 1984-88, Rice was three more places and two more points behind Raines.

MLB Expansion-era left fielders: Cumulative career OPS+

This category, which is simply the sum of career OPS+ values for each left fielder, is different from the standard career OPS+, which is essentially the player’s career average. Cumulative career OPS+ is designed to reward longevity. It is essentially a counter-balance to the first, peak-performance oriented, category.

Here’s the top 10.

Again, Bonds’ superiority is beyond question. His 14 seasons of an OPS+ at 170 or above, six of them topping 200, puts him nearly 900 points ahead of the runner-up left fielder, in this case Henderson. That gap approaches the gap between Henderson and Billy Williams back in seventh place.

Henderson’s prospects for finishing first in the position’s non-Bonds division are enhanced by his productivity over an extended period. Active from 1979-2003, Henderson was good enough to pile up a 128 OPS+ over 121 games with the New York Mets in 1999; he was 40 at the time.

The surprises in this category are probably a pair of Houston Astros, Luis Gonzalez and Jose Cruz, in the eighth and ninth spots. Gonzalez, better known for his part in bringing a World Series title to Phoenix in 2001, played for 15 seasons.

Cruz produced above-average totals annually for the Astros between 1974-86.

MLB Expansion-era left fielders: Defensive Wins Above Replacement

Left field is primarily an offensive position, but defensive play should not be entirely ignored.

Defensive WAR reflects the number of runs a player is projected to have saved his team due to his defensive play over the course of his career.

As you peruse the top 10, the offensive nature of this position will immediately become apparent. The average score of the rated players is minus-8.5 runs. Only three of the 30 turned in positive career defensive impacts.

Here are the top 10 for left fielders since 1969.

Bonds’ offensive numbers are so overwhelming that we tend to lose sight of his defensive abilities. As the data shows, they were – by the standards of the position – exceptional.

The rating of a handful of players is helped by their career longevity, or lack of same. Injuries limited Cespedes to fewer than 650 career games in the field, a lot fewer than left fielders viewed as more defensively competent such as Luis Gonzalez, Ryan Braun or Tim Raines. The byproduct was that Cespedes also had fewer opportunities to hurt his team’s defensive performance.

The same applies to Marcell Ozuna, whose rating is based on fewer than 900 games in the outfield. Dusty Baker, who at minus-6.0 rates 11 positions below Ozuna, was almost certainly a more competent outfielder. But Baker played nearly 2,000 games in the outfield, most of them in left.

MLB Expansion-era left fielders: Baserunning

In today’s game it’s easy to overlook the important role that baserunning can play in run production. That’s been especially true of the left field position, whose occupants include most of the era’s best baserunners: Henderson, Brock and Raines among them.

Their presence makes it desirable to include a baserunning component in this positional ranking. Baserunning wins, the number of wins calculated to have been added (or subtracted) due to a player’s skill on the bases, best fills that desire.

Here is the positional top 10.

As expected, the era’s great base stealers form a pack at the top of this category. Among them, Henderson, Raines, Brock, Coleman  and Lonnie Smith piled up more than 4,000 stolen bases, the vast majority of them post-1969.

Bonds didn’t dominate this category, but with 514 career steals he was no slouch either.

Given the modern de-emphasis on baserunning, the surprise of this top 10 might be the appearance of a couple of current players, both Milwaukee Brewers.

In his superb 2019 season, Christian Yelich added seven baserunning runs to his productivity thanks in part to 30 steals in 32 attempts. For his career Yelich has 128 steals and only 26 erasures, a solid 83 percent success rate.

Ryan Braun has 216 career steals against only 60 erasures, a 78 percent success rate. In 2015 his baserunning was worth six runs to Milwaukee; that’s basically a game. Between 2009-11 you could annually count on Braun’s baserunning to produce four extra runs for his team.

MLB Expansion-era left fielders: The final tabulation

The tabulation below is based on the average ordinal placement of each of the 30 left fielders in all four categories. A score of 1.0, indicating a first place rank in all five categories, would be perfect. The list also shows the left fielder’s standing on the Kenny and Costas lists.

Henderson turns out to be about as clear a No. 2 as Bonds is a position champion. He owes that to his baserunning exceptionality. He ranked first in that category; his closest overall competitor, Yaz, stood  21st.

Yastrzemski held on to third overall because he was superior to Raines in all four of the non-baserunning measurements.

The presumption — which Kenny as much as acknowledged — is that he dropped Bonds to fourth as punishment for the player’s steroid use. There are several ways to approach the evaluation-based problems presented by steroid use; Kenny chose one of them.

This rating – and Costas’, presumably – chose another, going strictly by the numbers. In that context, the wonderment perhaps isn’t that Kenny dropped Bonds to fourth but that he rated Ramirez as high as seventh. Based solely on his numbers, the twice-suspended Ramirez only ranked 11th in this evaluation … although admittedly it was a close 11th.

The inclusion of Ramirez – over Yelich – was the only manpower distinction between Kenny’s list and this one. With Bonds and Henderson in the No. 1 and 2 spots and Rose third, Costas’ list more closely reflected the positional elites. In fairness to this list, though, Costas excluded Braun, Foster Williams and Yelich from his top 10, in favor of Ramirez, Holliday, Belle and Brock.

In the statistical tabulation, they finished 11th, 15th, 16 and 18th respectively.