Bonds takes aim at Babe

The ex-Pirate will tie the Yankees legend with 53 more blasts.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
SAN FRANCISCO -- Barry Bonds took over third place on the all-time home run list Tuesday night with one of his predictably prodigious blasts, a solo shot in the seventh inning that splashed into McCovey Cove beyond the right-field fence. And now the story changes.
Passing the No. 3 man on the list had a cute, cozy plot line: Bonds taking aim at his godfather, Willie Mays, who cheered as much as anyone for homer No. 661.
But the next spot on the home run chart promises something of a personal face-off, a smackdown between legends past and present.
Bonds picked an argument with Babe Ruth as recently as July, saying that if he surpassed Mays, the only other number he cared about was the Bambino's 714.
"Because as a left-handed hitter, I wiped him out. That's it," the Giants left fielder said nine months ago. "And in the baseball world, Babe Ruth is everything, right? I got his slugging percentage and I'll take his home runs and that's it. Don't talk about him anymore."
Bonds later said he meant his comments as a compliment because Ruth set such a lofty standard. But he has dropped hints over the years that America's obsession with Ruth gets under his skin. Whenever the gushing reporters get too fawning over Ruth, Bonds reminds them that Hank Aaron is baseball's real home run king, with 755.
Another view
Because Ruth died in 1948, and was therefore unavailable for comment, the retort came from Michael Gibbons, the executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum.
He released a statement that read: "To suggest that those feats are somehow capable of 'wiping out' Ruth illustrates a complete disregard for the history and tradition of our national game, and its greatest player and star. .... Can Bonds 'wipe out' Ruth? Not today, not forever."
Perhaps it's a shame that Bonds and Ruth are off on the wrong foot, because they have so much in common: a compact left-handed swing, a cartoonish knack for long and/or dramatic home runs and a personality that, for better or worse, commanded as much attention as their play.
The raw numbers are the easy part. The exhaustive statistical Web site baseball-reference.com rates Bonds as the most comparable hitter to Ruth, a match based on the players' freakish combination of power and patience. They are similar in home runs (Ruth 714 to Bonds' 661), walks (2,062 to 2,079), strikeouts (1,330 to 1,389) and doubles (506 to 540).
They even have about the same size and weight. Each is listed at 6-foot-2, with Ruth at 215 and Bonds at 228.
Differences
But that's just it. The empiric reveals little about the aesthetic; Ruth's body late in his career looked a sack of potatoes (even in slimming pinstripes), and Bonds' looks like a steel mill.
The artistic difference is typical of what happens when the comparison stretches beyond the data. Ruth's homers made him universally beloved. He was a beer-swilling, woman-chasing rascal whom Lou Gehrig's wife, Eleanor, once described as "a huge man and a small child combined in one runaway personality."
Ruth rescued baseball from the abyss of the 1919 Black Sox scandal by essentially inventing the notion of a slugger. When Ruth hit 54 homers in 1920, the runner-up was George Sisler with 19. Ruth's record total that year was higher than that of every team except the Philadelphia Phillies.
By the time Ruth reached home run No. 700 in 1934, only two other players had as many as 300.
"Some 20 years ago, I stopped talking about the Babe for the simple reason that I realized that those who had never seen him didn't believe me," former player Tommy Holmes once said.
Ruth's popularity prompted an unprecedented one million people to go to Yankees home games in 1920 and made other owners realize that fans thirsted for offense. The league introduced a livelier ball, and players followed Ruth's model of using longer, heavier bats with thin handles.
The number of runs scored annually rose from fewer than 9,000 per season in the dead-ball era of the 1910s to more than 13,000 in 1930.
Ruth changed the game in ways that only occasionally require reminding. When Ruth died, legend has it that a brash young rookie lamented that he would probably have to chip in for flowers.
"Listen, punk," Waite Hoyt, a former teammate of Ruth's, said in a clubhouse speech. "Ruth has meant more to ballplayers than any man who ever lived. You ought to get down on your knees and thank God that a man like Babe existed. Where do you think you'd be if it hadn't been for the big fellow? Or where would I be? Or any of us? Or where would baseball be if it hadn't been for the Babe?"
Wrath
Ruth had only the faintest attention to training. He racked up fines, and the wrath of his managers, by flouting team rules. Ping Bodie, a Yankees teammate, was once asked what it was like to room with Ruth on the road. "I don't know. I never see him. I room with a suitcase," Bodie said.
Bonds, by contrast, doesn't drink, making only rare exceptions for champagne for a Giants clinching celebration.
His dedication to training is ferocious, so much so that his home runs have brought a different kind of scrutiny to baseball than Ruth did, with the ongoing steroid suspicions.