Who is the real home run king? This is a topic that came up a lot earlier this month when the great Hank Aaron celebrated his 85th birthday. Aaron, whose total of 755 career homers eclipsed Babe Ruth's long-standing record of 714, was himself later passed by Barry Bonds, who ended with 762. But for well-known reasons, Bonds isn't exactly the people's choice. That would be Aaron, but even Ruth still has support in some circles.
Luckily, it's not hard to construct a case to support whichever legend you want to support.
The case for Barry Bonds
It's a simple thing, really. Barry Bonds hit 762 home runs during his should-be-Hall-of-Fame career. Unless I missed the memo, all of those home runs count in the official records. No one has ever hit more. Thus, Bonds is the all-time home run king.
Yet it still feels like there are a lot of people who don't feel that way, or at least don't want to admit it. If you associate Bonds with PEDs and you equate PEDs with cheating and you think no one before 1993 found ways to boost their fortunes via that kind of marginal behavior, you might be one of them.
In the Hall of Fame museum in Cooperstown, there is a nifty exhibit on the great home run chases, including a plaque bearing the number 762 with an admission that it's the big league record. The description mentions PEDs, and if the point is lost on anyone, there are considerably larger commemorations nearby for 755 and 714.
Earlier this month, in a Boston Globe piece about why fans of the NFL seem to have a more forgiving attitude about PEDs than their MLB brethren, Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Costas pointed toward numbers as a chief reason for the disparity. He suggested that most NFL fans don't know exactly how many yards career rushing champ Emmitt Smith had, "But they know 755, until it was bogusly broken."
But it was indeed broken.
The case for Hank Aaron
Costas, who actually favors Bonds' candidacy for Cooperstown, is in the camp of those who would prefer to think of Aaron as baseball's home run king. I'm not in that camp, myself. The record is the record, and if you look through world history in general, and baseball in particular, the kings haven't always been the most beloved characters.
Nevertheless, there is a way in which people who want to think of Aaron as the home run champ can do so, and it has nothing to do with wishing away Bonds' total and any aspersions rooted in PED associations. The word, in a nutshell, is context.
First off, let's recognize that because Bonds' career was clipped after the 2007 season, when no major league team seemed interested in employing a hitter coming off a season of 28 homers, 132 walks and a .480 on-base percentage, he only finished seven dingers ahead of Aaron. You don't need to do much contextualizing to wipe away a seven-homer difference, although once you get started, you might actually end up increasing that gap or reopening the door for Mr. Ruth.
Next, let's consider a few facts. Offensive levels took off between the 1992 and 1993 seasons. It's really remarkable, when you think about it. Runs per game jumped by nearly a half-tally, homers went up, BABIP went up, and they all remained at their new levels or above for a long, long time. PED hand-wringers like to refer to the meat of that era as the steroid era, but it's a label that's as misleading as it is unfair, and it serves to disparage the work of an entire generation of ballplayers. Anyway, beginning with the 1993 campaign, baseball began a long, offense-intensive era.
Bonds hit 586 of his 762 homers from 1993 to the end of his career, all with the Giants. (Everything before that came during his years with the Pirates.) Whatever the conditions may have been that contributed to the prolific scoring and power hitting post-1993, there is no doubt that the era was ripe for home run hitters. No one seized on that more than Bonds.
Adding to Bonds' feat is the fact that during his years in San Francisco, he had to overcome ballparks not generally favorable to a lefty, pull-hitting slugger. That was especially true once the Giants moved into Pac Bell/SBC/AT&T/Oracle Park in time for the 2000 season. Still, for his career, Bonds hit nearly as many homers at home -- 379 -- as he did on the road (383). The fact is, he didn't hit a lot of fence-scrapers. He was venue-impervious.
As for Aaron, he indeed played in some homer-friendly home parks. County Stadium in Milwaukee worked against him until the park factors turned his way during the Braves' last three seasons there. Then, of course, Aaron moved into what became known as "the launching pad" when the Braves played in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. But, like Bonds, the park factors aren't really reflected in his career splits. Aaron hit 385 homers at home over his career and 370 on the road.
You can't dismiss the notion that if you flipped home parks between Aaron and Bonds, the latter's edge would be greater than seven homers. But some players had homer totals that were obviously skewed by venue. Just to pick on Mel Ott, who was unquestionably a great hitter but had his power numbers padded by the short fence at the Polo Grounds: Ott hit 323 of his 511 homers at home. Neither Bonds nor Aaron featured anything close to that level of asymmetry.
However, there was a considerable difference in the offensive environments in which Aaron and Bonds played. Aaron prospered during the entire decade of the 1960s, one of the most pitching-dominant periods in baseball history. Hitters in the NL homered 33 percent more often on a per-game basis during Bonds' 1993 to 2007 heyday than they did during the 1960s, a decade that covered Aaron's ages from 26 to 35. He averaged 37.5 homers per season during that time.
Over at baseball-reference.com, they have a tool that lets you look at numbers adjusted for ballpark and league context. You can do this at the career level, so it's easy to generate the all-time home run list adjusted to whatever season and park you want. Let's adjust the homer list to a generic (neutral) 1985 National League ballpark. Why 1985? Well, since 1901, the average number of home runs per game in the senior circuit has been 0.73. In 1985, that's how many homers per game were hit. So we're looking at the numbers as they might look if everyone had played in a neutral league and a neutral park.
Here's the top five:
All-time HR leaderboard, context-neutral
1. Hank Aaron, 766
2. Barry Bonds, 744
3. Babe Ruth, 677
4. Willie Mays, 661
5. Alex Rodriguez, 642
The case for Babe Ruth
With that context-neutral glance, Aaron vaults back to the top. The new golden number is 766. What jumps out on the list, though, isn't that Aaron jumps in front of Bonds. It's that Ruth's number gets dropped to 677. This seems off, right? After all, Ruth belted homers at a clip far above other sluggers of his time, especially during the 1920s. In 1920, his first huge homer season, Ruth hit 54 dingers -- four more than any other team in the American League. Batters hit just 0.38 homers per game in the AL during the '20s; Ruth hit 0.33 homers per Yankee game by himself. How does he get adjusted downward?
This is all about ballpark adjustments. All through his post-Red Sox career, Ruth played in ballparks that were well suited to lefty sluggers. From 1920 to 1922, it was the Polo Grounds that Ott later found so comfy; from 1923 to 1934, it was then-new and now-old Yankee Stadium. During most of that time, only St. Louis' Sportsman's Park and Philadelphia's Baker Bowl featured more stark park factors for lefty home run leaders.
The thing is, like Aaron and Bonds, Ruth's slugging was more or less impervious to venue. He actually hit more road homers during his career (367) than home (347). Is it really fair to slice 37 homers from his career total because of venue? At the same time, is it fair to Aaron and Bonds to overlook Ruth's park factors and just go with league-adjusted totals? Indeed, ignoring park factors and adjusting only for league should be a huge advantage for Ruth. He hit 55 homers per 162 games during the 1920s alone, an outrageous number. During that decade, he nearly doubled the total of any other hitter.
Using Lee Sinins' Complete Baseball Encyclopedia, let's generate a list of players with the most homers above league average through baseball history:
Most HRs above league average, all time
1. Babe Ruth, 608
2. Barry Bonds, 509
3. Hank Aaron, 452
4. Mark McGwire, 409
5. Jimmie Foxx, 385
Here is a summation, a few quick, direct sentences you can throw out to support whichever "king" you want to support. I included some bonus sentences, just to cover the bases for candidates we haven't mentioned. There doesn't have to be a right answer.
1. Barry Bonds is the home run king because his 762 homers are more than any big league player ever hit.
2. Hank Aaron is the home run king because when you account for park and league context, his 766 adjusted homers are more than any big league player ever hit.
3. Babe Ruth is the home run king because he hit 608 homers above the average of his leagues, nearly 100 more than any other big league player ever hit.
4. Josh Gibson is the home run king because even though he never got a chance to compile big league numbers, he is said to have hit at least 800 homers in the Negro Leagues, and we know his power was special because he once hit a homer into the bleachers at the Polo Grounds.
5. Sadaharu Oh is the home run king because he hit a verified 868 home runs in the Nippon Professional Baseball league. No one has hit more.
Case closed.