Rating Barry Bonds as an expansion-era left fielder

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.