San Francisco Giants legend Barry Bonds joined Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson on the latest episode of All The Smoke to discuss his journey and his impact on the game of baseball.
When you think of home run hitters in baseball, many names come to mind. However, none are bigger than Barry Bonds. The San Francisco legend’s accolades speak for themselves: 7-time MVP, 14-time All-Star, 8 Gold Gloves, all-time home run leader, single-season leader.
Two minutes of Barry Bonds launching balls into the McCovey cove for your viewing pleasure pic.twitter.com/sj7esCLoRo
— Baseball Legends (@Leg_baseball) December 17, 2022
Although those numbers are SCREAM GOAT, you won’t hear Bonds discuss them; instead, he lets his peers talk for him. As Bonds put it, they’ll talk about you when you’re good at something. Bonds knows what his stats are, to the point he does not boast or brag about himself. Instead, He is more interested in passing the knowledge on to the younger generation. People ask Bonds: How do you do it? And for him, it is simple: “Stay around long enough until someone talks about you. Just don’t be a commercial.” When Bonds looks back on his achievements these days, it is different. He looks back at all of the hard work he has put in and his God-given talent and says to himself, “How can I take those experiences and pass them on?” For Bonds, it is about figuring out ways to articulate the lessons he has learned and then having the person listening pass them on to someone else.
It is one thing to watch Bonds hit home runs and another to be inside the mind of arguably one the game’s greatest hitters. Bonds says the great ones take pieces of certain players’ games and incorporate them into their own repertoire. Bonds watched greats like Pete Rose, Tony Gwynn, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and took a piece from each of their games to invent his own. Bonds just wanted to be a great hitter. He knew he had power and was a wizard with the bat, but his father Bobby encouraged him to be a great hitter and that if you chase the fence, you’ll lose. Bonds zeroed in on studying contact hitters like Gwynn and Rod Carew because he could hit the ball deep, but he had a strike-out problem early in his career. Once, he took his dad’s advice to work on the areas of his game he wasn’t good at, which made a difference.
Bonds’ father tremendously impacted his development as a hitter and CHALLENGED him constantly. Bonds expressed that his dad could dissect a pitcher FAST and that his mindset as a hitter was on another level. When Bonds would come home to celebrate hitting two home runs, his dad would say. “Well, why didn’t you hit four?” His godfather Willie Mays would take a different approach, giving him positive encouragement. His father would play little mind games with him, even placing his son Nikolai, a little boy at the time, behind home plate in a batting cage cranking the speed of the pitch on the machine and telling Bonds to hit it. He refused to let his son stand behind home plate, so his dad replaced him with a tee and told him to envision the tee as his son, and Bonds whacked every ball that came his way. In the end, Bobby Bonds and Mays provided a balance for Barry so that he did not get too up or down, and he has a deep appreciation for his father challenging him.
But the real question is, can Bonds still take someone deep at 100 mph? Bonds explained that hitting 100 mph is EASY for him, even at 60 years old. He added that no matter how hard you throw a baseball, he will be able to hit it. His thought is that if a catcher behind home plate catches a baseball and throws it back, then all he has to do is replace the catcher’s mitt with a baseball bat, and the ball is OUTTA THERE!
Watch or listen to the full episode below and keep an eye on DraftKings Network for new episodes of All The Smoke Unplugged every Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET!
SHOW BREAKDOWN
Barry Bonds’ wild Rookie Hazing, Getting ignored by Michael Jordan & Don’t call me the GOAT | ALL THE SMOKE
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