Baseball Evolution: Chancey: Fred Lewis and the New Giants

I know Fred Frith is recording with Barry Guy…so there must be some sort of Zelaznyian alternate shadow universe high jinx at play here.

“The thing about Bonds,” offered an older member of the Giants’ coaching staff, “is that he didn’t actually hit the ball very much. This is supposed to be one of the game’s great hitters, but don’t you have to actually hit to be considered as such? Growing up, the great players of our generation didn’t take tons of walks. They actually focused on hitting the ball.” Perhaps the most startling difference between Lewis and Bonds is their ability to hit the ball. Bonds only hit .276 last year, and with two full months left in this season, Lewis has 92 hits, on pace for well over 150. But Bonds failed to get more than 150 hits in any of his last six seasons, and failed to even get over 100 in the last two.

As a member of the Giants’ front office recently said, “Guys like Peter Gammons say, ‘the purpose of any baseball player is to score runs, because at the end of the game, the team with the most runs wins.’” And there can be no doubt that Lewis is a better run scorer than Bonds had been in recent years. Lewis’ 63 runs scored in 2008 have him on pace to eclipse Bonds’ totals from each of the last three years – 75, 74, and 8. But it gets better. When you subtract the number of times Bonds scored via homerun – the number of times he drove himself in – the numbers are even worse. Bonds scored only 47 runs other than homeruns in 2007, only 48 in 2006, and only three in 2005. Incredibly, when you look at runs scored without homeruns, Lewis is currently on pace to score more times in 2008 than Bonds ever did in his entire career!