Barry Bonds dropped a take on Thursday, June 20 that is simultaneously preposterous and somehow believable. More importantly, you can’t prove him wrong.
Speaking with the FOX Sports broadcast team before the San Francisco Giants faced the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, he confidently said that if given the chance, he would take Satchel Paige deep.
Former Yankee and current FOX analyst Derek Jeter thought he was putting Bonds on the spot when he asked, “What would you do against Satchel Paige?”
Bonds sounded almost insulted that he even had to answer the question.
“Me?” he asked, incredulously.
Bonds continued in the confident tone we’ve come to expect from the all-time Home Run King.
“Gone. You lost your mind, Jeter. Gone. Simple. Gone. Read about it on ESPN, FOX, what else you wanna talk about? You gotta believe in yourself. If I don’t believe in me, who’s gonna believe in me?”
To be fair, not many would doubt Bonds, who hit 762 home runs over his 22-year career, winning 7 MVP awards along the way and finishing as baseball’s all-time leader in homers, walks, and intentional walks.
What Would a Barry Bonds vs. Satchel Paige Matchup Look Like?
It would have been must-see television. That much we know.
It’s tough to dive too far into the stats because so much of what Paige did went unrecorded. This is especially true of his time in the Negro Leagues, where he spent the bulk of his career.
We do know he struck out a ton of batters relative to his peers, leading his league in strikeouts six times in his career. Maybe this story from Sam Dykstra of MLB Network will paint a better picture of how sure Paige was that he could strike a guy out.
“Satchel Paige would sometimes to tell his fielders to go sit down,” he wrote. “He was that confident he’d get a strikeout.”
Now imagine a guy with that much confidence facing a guy who once did this at Yankee Stadium:
Barry Bonds’ Numbers Get More Ridiculous the More You Look at Them
Have you ever spent time just staring at Bonds’ Baseball-Reference page? If not, I recommend it. If you’re too young to remember, there was a period throughout the early 2000s when Bonds would come to the plate and be intentionally walked, no matter the situation.
It even happened once with the bases loaded. And at the Home Run Derby.
Maybe the wildest thing is that Bonds has more home runs than every player ever, but only led the league in home runs twice (once being in 2001 when he hit 73, a single-season record that still stands).
If that’s not the wildest, maybe it’s his 2004 season when he walked in 38% of his plate appearances and still managed to hit 45 homers. It could also be his six seasons with an OPS+ over 200 or his career 162.8 bWAR.
Most probably remember Bonds as the lumbering outfielder sending balls out to McCovey Cove for the Giants, so it’s easy to forget that he was also a base stealer in his days with the Pirates. Bonds swiped 514 bags in his career and hit 77 triples.
Bonds hit .397 in his career on 3-1 counts, made more impressive knowing that in the last third of his career his odds of getting something to hit in that situation were next to 0.
That’s all to say, yes, we would have loved to see Bonds vs. Paige. And, yes, there’s a decent chance Bonds would obliterate whatever the Hall of Famer threw.
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