Barry Bonds' Gold Gloves

Barry Bonds won eight Gold Gloves in his career, five of which came during his time with the Giants. All but one, in hindsight after his age 26 season, was won with his reputation and his bat.

This is not something new. Ever since the dawn of the Gold Glove award, they have been given primarily to well known players who generally have good offensive seasons and have won the award before. It seems this was the case for the Gold Gloves won by Bonds in the San Francisco era.

Here is a table that shows Bonds' Gold Glove seasons with his dWAR as measured by Baseball-Reference with his rank among outfielders.

Year	Age	Tm	dWAR	dWAR Rank	Awards
1990	25	PIT	2.9	1st	AS,MVP-1,GG,SS
1991	26	PIT	1.9	3rd	MVP-2,GG,SS
1992	27	PIT	0.8	19th	AS,MVP-1,GG,SS
1993	28	SFG	1.1	12th	AS,MVP-1,GG,SS
1994	29	SFG	0.6	11th	AS,MVP-4,GG,SS
1996	31	SFG	1.0	15th	AS,MVP-5,GG,SS
1997	32	SFG	1.5	4th	AS,MVP-5,GG,SS
1998	33	SFG	1.0	10th	AS,MVP-8,GG

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 3/7/2011.

The Gold Glove for outfielders is not split by position like the other spots on the diamond, so the award should go to the top three outfielders regardless of where they played. As we can see from the table above, when Bonds won the award, he was often down on the list.

Bonds was an excellent defender, especially early in his career, but as he aged, he moved back towards the crowd and won awards with his bat and his reputation.

The one thing missing from the table that I want to mention is Bonds' best season defensively did not win him a Gold Glove. In 1989, Bonds turned in one of the great defensive performances of all time according to Baseball-Reference's defensive measurement. He had the third best season of any outfielder of all time and the best ever by a left fielder with 37 runs above replacement.

That year, he lost out to Eric Davis (-21 runs), Tony Gwynn (-23 runs) and Andy Van Slyke (13 runs). The difference between Bonds and Davis/Gwynn has to be among the highest for any Gold Glove/non-Gold Golve winner of all time.

Maybe that slight is the reason the voters kept punching his name all those years.

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