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chris cathcartA lot of this has to be put into some historical perspective. There are certainly lots of legitimate grounds for suspicion that have now deflated folks' perception of Bonds performance in recent years. The problem being that we just don't really know with him whether the numbers were all legit. That's quite unfortunate for Bonds' historical stature and for the fans. Now, also consider these points:
(1) Steroid-enhanced or not, the numbers Bonds put up over the previous 4 years are simply incredible. Far and away so much better than all these other players in the league, ALSO UNDER THE SAME CLOUD OF SUSPICION. It's simply too incredible to believe that steroids alone could account for that much of an improvement in performance.
(2) Give Ruth and Hornsby steroids and see what numbers THEY'd put up? Well, let's again use some historical perspective: Put Bonds back in the days before there were steroids against the caliber of opposition that existed back in Ruth and Hornsby's day (those nostalgic good ol' days, I know, when baseball was such a tougher game than it is today). Of course, that little thought experiment would require that we assume no color barrier in the Major Leagues.
(3) Even before the he-got-big-and-unbelievable years, Bonds put up a whole decade's worth of MVP-caliber performances in the '90s, virtually year in and year out. He was already a 3-time MVP, two of them runaway picks ('92 and '93). He already had the 500 HR / 500 SB accomplishment pretty well locked up. I guess he played the field well enough to win 8 Gold Gloves. He was the most dominant player since Mays/Mantle as it was, a first-ballot, top-tier lock for the HOF. The only player from the past 35+ years that could compare in terms of dominance would be the only other 3-time MVP of that whole period, Mike Schmidt (though Alex Rodriguez appears on his way to joining that class of dominance, even if he falls short of the well-deserved 3-MVP mark). Notice how, unlike the good ol' days, 3-time MVPs have now become few and far between. No big surprise since it becomes harder to win MVPs when there are more players around competing for the MVP.
(4) If no one had noticed, Hornsby hit .400 in the days when doing so seemed actually possible enough for it to be done several times within the space of a few years. How one could compare a player from today with a player back then based on hitting .400, I don't know. No one around today hits .400; the game is too different now. You have to judge player performance by the standards of performance for each era, and compare players across eras by how much they stood above their peers, taking into account, of course, the relative difficulty of standing out, to a given extent, above one's peers. What was the relative difficulty for Nap Lajoie in hitting .426 in '01 compared to other performances?
Anyhow, with Bonds we may never really know for sure where he's supposed to stand amongst the greats. I'd still say Babe Ruth is the greatest, and Bonds has a case for #2. He was already in the top 10 amongst the likes of Ruth, Mays, Aaron, Mantle, Williams, Cobb, Wagner, and, yes, Schmidt. It looks like A-Rod will end up there, too.