Throwback Thursday: Barry Bonds Walks On, and On, and On, and On

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

Barry Bonds was fired from his position as Miami Marlins hitting coach this week. The news was immediately followed by reports that manager Don Mattingly had called out Bonds on a road trip for not being committed to the job, while the team's best hitter, Giancarlo Stanton, had "tuned out" the greatest hitter to ever live.

My guess is that the only part of that sentence you feel strongly about are the final five words. Greatest hitter who ever lived. Because Bonds is a living, breathing litmus test for how you feel about Major League Baseball's steroids era. You either: A) know that he's the greatest ever, because said greatness is an objective fact stemming from basic observation, and accept the drug-soaked climate in which he played as an important contextual element, or B) are grossly offended because you regard Bonds as a cheater, and are destined to end up shouting about a museum in middle-of-nowhere rural New York, since we seem to do that every year.

Today, however, we are not going to shout. Today is special. Fifteen years ago this week, Bonds smashed his 73rd home run and became baseball's single-season home run king, a record that still stands. It is his most famous record, one that contributed mightily to his career record of 762. Only neither of those marks fully captures what made Bonds the greatest.

For that, you need to fully appreciate another, less heralded Bonds record: 688 career intentional walks, a total that will almost certainly never be matched.

For most hitters, getting intentionally walked is largely a reflection of the game situation and how good the hitters are behind them. But this wasn't the case for Bonds. In 1998, Buck Showalter, then the Diamondbacks manager, walked Bonds in the ninth, with two outs, up two runs, and with the bases loaded. ''There are only three or four players in this game you'd do it with, and Bonds is one of them,'' Showalter said after the game. ''You try to give your club the best opportunity to win a game; it might not have been good, but it was better than the option we had.'' For what it's worth, the gamble worked. The next batter lined out to center to end the game.

Bonds' intentional walks (IBB) numbers are, to use a technical term, fucking ridiculous. He was intentionally walked 5.5 percent of his plate appearances. No. 2 on the all-time list is Albert Pujols, with 302 IBBs—2.9 percent of his plate appearances. That's less than half of Bonds' total (though that number will go slightly up, as Pujols is, of course, still playing).

To put it another way: Pujols is 36 years old and in his 16th MLB season. He has the second most IBBs in baseball history. And at his current pace, he would have to log another 13,487 plate appearances—2,935 more than he has had in his career thus far—to catch Bonds.

In fact, this is what makes Bonds even more remarkable. At age 36, he did have more IBBs than Pujols, but not by a tremendous margin: 355 to Pujols's 302. What happened next, however, was unprecedented. Two hundred and forty-nine of Bonds's 688 IBBs came between 2002 and 2004, the three years following his 73-home-run season. (These four seasons are, without a doubt, the four greatest seasons by any hitter ever, but that's another topic that's been well covered.)

Those three years, by themselves, would put Bonds No. 6 in career IBBs, ahead of Ken Griffey Jr. Bonds' 2004 season was perhaps the ultimate example of just how fucking ridiculous (again, technical term) he was. That year—just that year—he was intentionally walked a record 120 times, more than the next six highest IBB totals from that season combined. That's one out of every five times he came to the plate—and twice that year, Bonds was intentionally walked four times in one nine-inning game.

That 2004 record is almost double the previous Major League record of 68 IBBs, set by … Bonds, in 2002 (which at the time crushed the previous record of 45, set by Willie McCovey, in 1969; Bonds would take third place on the all-time list from him, as well, in 2003, with 61 IBBs, and now holds six of the top ten spots). Hell, Bonds' 2004 season alone puts him 83rd on the all-time IBB list, tied with Brooks Robinson.

A 2014 Baseball Prospectus article by Sam Miller helps put this season in perspective. Three times, Bonds was intentionally walked to lead off an inning. That's crazy! Also that year, with a runner in scoring position and first base open, Bonds was intentionally walked 70 percent of the time. By comparison, Baseball Prospectus found that Giancarlo Stanton—far and away the best hitter on the 2013 Marlins, a feared slugger with absolutely no lineup protection—was intentionally walked just nine percent of the time in the same situation.

Here's more from Miller:

"Bonds' career win probability added on intentional walks, according to Baseball-Reference, is 10.1. By being merely scary enough to force the other team to pitch around him, Bonds produced 10 wins. Being scary was a 10-win skill. Ten wins! Adrian Beltre, by comparison, has been worth a bit under nine wins of WPA in his career."

You know who else understood that Bonds was the greatest hitter who ever lived? Opposing pitchers, who were scared shitless of him. Miller makes the point that many of these types of outlier records can seem as if they were set by time-traveling players plucked from the future—think Babe Ruth smashing more home runs than several teams put together, presaging the rise of the home run in general. Only that's not the case with Bonds. He didn't benefit from a larger trend, or herald a shift in the way the game is played. Intentional walks skyrocketed during his career solely because teams were intentionally walking him at an unprecedented rate. If you scroll down through the years, the top ten IBB numbers for each season look damn similar throughout history, with one exception: Barry Bonds. And they went back to being normal after Bonds retired. This wasn't baseball evolution. This was Bonds single-handedly moving the needle.

Last year, researchers at Villanova tried to create the most objective measure possible for the greatest sports record. Among other things, they took into account the years the current record has stood, the years the previous record stood, and the percentage the current record is better than the previous record. It wasn't a perfect study, but in the end, they concluded that the greatest mark is not Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game or Nolan Ryan's seven no-hitters. It's Bonds' 688 intentional walks.

The other records in the top ten—Cy Young's career wins, Oscar Robertson's triple-doubles, Wayne Gretzky's career assists—all required performance. Struggle and effort. Hitters were trying to beat Young; defenders were trying to stop Robertson and Gretzky. Bonds earned his mark in truly unique fashion: through pure psychological dominance. He didn't defeat his opponents; they simply surrendered. Six hundred and eighty-eight times in Bonds' career, he needed only to walk up to the plate, look at the pitcher, and stand there holding a bat. The greatest hitter who ever lived set the most incredible, unbreakable record in sports by doing nothing at all.

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