Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Tom Glavine, & Job Hunting

I know, I know, you're thinking that this is that old Sesame Street clip... "One of these things doesn't belong here..." But as a guy who's two passions are recruiting and baseball, I can assure you that they're actually quite similar.

Most baseball fans rely on traditional, but irrelevant metrics like Runs Scored, Runs Batted In, or Batting Average. Recently, a trend called Sabremetrics, the baseball equivalent of a consulting case study, has stepped in to develop new metric tools to help make better business decisions around evaluating player contributions.

Runs Scored is a measure of what other payers on your team accomplish while you are base. Runs Batted In is a measure of what other players on your team do prior to your at-bat. Batting average is a binary statistic that accounts for successful and unsuccessful outcomes without parsing the degrees of success.

So our friends the math geeks have developed a tool called OPS (On-base Plus Slugging) which is an indicator of a players total offensive output measured in bases exclusive of the contributions of his team members.

League average OPS is .746, and only 10 players in history have managed a career OPS over 1. Barry Bonds is one of them. In fact, he has done it 4 times, and has 4 of the top 10 best individuals seasons in history measured by OPS. From the perspective of pure productivity, Bonds is easily the best offensive player ever to play the game.

Which is perhaps why so many people find him so offensive.

His defenders point out that he has never tested positive for PED (Performance Enhancing Drugs), and assert that he is innocent until proven guilty.

His detractors point to a mountain of completely anecdotal or circumstantial evidence, which is compelling, but certainly not conclusive. Arguments include his rapid weight gain immediately preceding his assault on the single season HR record, photos of the disparity between his rookie physique and his current one, and the content of a book called Game of Shadows, who's authors went to jail for refusing to disclose their source for illegally obtained Grand Jury testimony, in which Bonds claims that he "never knowingly took steroids," and went on to detail a cream he used made from flax seed oil which was given to him , by his childhood friend and weight trainer, Greg Anderson, who is now in jail for refusing to disclose the contents of that cream, among other things.

In the history of baseball 4 players have hit more than 60 HR in a season, and only one has hit more than 70. Barry Lamar Bonds hit 73- at age 36. That's a 22% increase one the record 61 which had stood for over 40 years until Mark McGuire (also now implicated) shattered that record 3 years earlier.

Here's what I know. Players' offensive capability over more than 10,000 players spanning 120 years has peaked at age 33. At 36 players begin to "drop of the cliff," a phrase coined for Willie Mays, who was productive right up until he wasn't- at age 36. He retired the next year.

Barry hit 73 HR at age 36, and just hit the 756th of his career at age 42.

I am convinced that Bonds has been chemically enhanced. There is no valid test for HGH, the most commonly used substance among MLB players. There was no testing AT ALL in MLB until 2000. And for those reasons, I am convinced that many of his peers, both hitters and pitchers were also juiced.

Every major rules change in the last 15 years has favored the hitter, from lowering the pitching mound, to shrinking the strike zone, diluting the talent pool with team expansion, smaller ballparks, and on and on... Offensive numbers are out of control, but I'm not convinced that steroids are to blame.

In fact, until Carlton Fisk began weight lifting in the mid-70s teams discouraged weight training on the theory that too much muscle mass would slow bat-speed a key element of power hitting.

The only proof we have that this "cheating" gave him an advantage is anecdotal at best and ignores many other factors in play.

So convinced that Barry cheated, and unconvinced that his cheating helped him, I say no asterisk is necessary.

In the same week that Barry hit his record breaking HR, Tom Glavine became the last pitcher who will ever record 300 wins, and Alex Rodriguez became the youngest player ever to hit 500 HR. Two records we can feel great about overshadowed by one that as a nation we are conflicted about.

This is what consultants do for business. develop and use metrics to redefine how we evaluate and operate to create more value, which in this case correlate to understanding. the other place where value correlates to understanding is the job market. What are other saying about this company? What is my career path there? How do my skills match up to the opportunity, and how will they develop once I'm there?

As a consultant, you are uniquely positioned to find the best opportunities and evaluate them critically.

As for my take on Barry and history, I sat my son, who knows just enough about baseball to scream "Go Yankees at completely inappropriate times, in front of the TiVo, and I showed him Kirk Gibson's homerun from 1988, a clip of my father catching the winning HR ball at the first game I ever went to at Yankee Stadium. I showed him the Yankees winning the world Series in 1996, and Cal Ripkin's 2131st game in a row. I showed him Mark McGuire hit 62 and 70, and Barry Bonds hit 73, and 756. And I didn't tell him about PED's or controversy. I told him to love the game, and remember the shiver down his spine- and I told him that when he grows up, he'll tell everyone that he got to see the last pitcher ever throw his 300th win, the same week that he saw Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th homer. When you grow up, I told him, Alex Rodriguez will own every major offensive record in the history of the game, and you'll get to watch him do it.