BASEBALL’S BIGGEST SUPERSTARS : While Comparisons of Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Are as Inescapable as Jams on Los Angeles Freeways, Most Agree They’re Game’s Best All-Around Players

Jay Buhner, eavesdropping from one locker over, picks up a thread of the conversation and joins in the fray of what so far has been a frustrating attempt to persuade Ken Griffey Jr. to compare himself to Barry Bonds. To this point, Griffey has been intractable in his unwillingness to be drawn into the subject.

“Let’s see if I can help,” says Buhner, addressing his Mariners teammate. “You both are lefthanded.”

“That’s right,” says Griffey, happy for the assistance.

“You both are black,” Buhner says.

“We’re both black,” Griffey agrees.

“You both wear Nike,” Buhner says.

“We both wear earrings, too,” Griffey says.

“Let’s see what else,” Buhner says. “He uses a Wilson glove, and you’re a Rawlings man. And you both use Louisville (Slugger) bats.”

“He uses a black one. I use a white one,” Griffey says. “Can’t compare that.”

“What about batting gloves?” Buhner asks.

“He’s Franklin. I’m Nike,” Griffey says.

“Can’t compare that, either,” Buhner says.

“He has his picture on his wristband,” Griffey offers. “I’ve got my number on mine.”

“See?” says Buhner, turning to the interrogator. “They’re totally different. No comparison.”

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But, of course, Bonds and Griffey have much in common, starting with the fact they are sons of former major league stars (Bobby Bonds and Ken Griffey Sr.) and rank as baseball’s top two superstars. For the past three seasons or so, Griffey and Bonds have been inexorably linked by the language of sportswriting, if nothing else. When the subject is one, it is written this way: “Barry Bonds, who along with Ken Griffey Jr. is considered the best all-around player in baseball . . . “ When the subject is the other, it is written like this: “Ken Griffey Jr., who along with Barry Bonds is considered the best all-around player in the game . . . “ The comparison is as inescapable as a Los Angeles freeway jam.

They are different in many respects beyond Buhner’s lighter examination of the two men and in ways more pertinent to the value judgment at issue here. Griffey plays center field; Bonds plays left. Bonds is 32, with another birthday coming up July 24; Griffey is 27. Griffey plays in the hit-happy American League; Bonds plays in the pitching-powerful National League. Bonds’ supporting cast with the Giants hasn’t given him much protection in the batting order in recent seasons; Griffey’s teammates with the Mariners form perhaps the most potent lineup in the game. All of those differences make comparison a risky business.

As it happens, Griffey and Bonds are about to play against each other in meaningful games, which has never happened before. Through the magic of interleague play, the Mariners visit San Francisco to play the Giants June 17-18. The Giants travel to Seattle for games June 30 and July 1. It will be Griffey vs. Bonds on the same field, together at last in something other than an All-Star Game or a spring-training exhibition, the two best all-around players in the game.

It isn’t much of a stretch to signal the occasion of those games as a cross-course pivot point in their careers, because it has become apparent as this season has progressed that they are no longer “the best all-around players.” At this point, there is only one, a clear-cut “best.”

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The tie was broken once and for all in late April, on the night Griffey hit three home runs in Toronto. Those three, his 11th, 12th and 13th in April, gave him the major league record for that month. If a watershed moment can be pinpointed, that is the day the handoff finally took place and the torch was passed. Griffey, it can safely be said now, clearly is the best all-around player in baseball, finally assuming that unofficial mantle from Bonds this season in the culmination of a transition that has been inevitable since 1991, when Griffey hit .327 and put together his first 100-RBI year to establish himself as one of the game’s supermen.

Since that season, even Bonds, a three-time National League Most Valuable Player while Griffey has yet to win his first MVP, has known it was only a matter of time. Now, as Griffey threatens to break Roger Maris’ home run record (61 in one season) and Hack Wilson’s RBI record (190), that time has come. And with four games left in May, he broke the major league record for home runs through that month when he connected for No. 23. Junior had held the record with 22, set in 1994.

The Triple Crown is a real possibility for Griffey, as it is for the Rockies’ Larry Walker in the National League this season.

“What Junior is going to do throughout the course of his career is going to well take over anything I’ve ever done,” says Bonds, who is refreshingly open and engaging in a conversation about Griffey, in contrast to Griffey’s disinclination to discuss Bonds. “Junior started in the game three years younger than I was when I came into the league (Griffey was 19, Bonds was nearly 22). Sure, someday there will be some other kid who comes along and maybe be as good as Junior. But Bonds has been one of the game’s best players for so long that it has been difficult to gauge a younger man’s performance against his standard. On baseball’s time line, Bonds’ longevity alone--he’s in his 12th major league season--has always been at an advantage in a comparison with Griffey or any other current player. But after 8 1/2 seasons in the major leagues, Griffey has played long enough and well enough to mitigate the seniority argument. Ask any general manager outside Seattle and San Francisco which player he’d take if both were offered in trades on the same day, and the answer almost unanimously will be Griffey.

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To be fair, though, that answer comes with qualifiers that lessen its relevance to a mano a mano appraisal of their all-around baseball abilities. Most general managers will choose Griffey partly because his future in the game is longer. And, partly, they’ll choose Griffey because he plays center field, which requires a unique and more demanding set of skills than left field does. Bonds is the best all-around left fielder in baseball, but a center fielder who hits for the power that Griffey does is as rare as a Rafael Belliard home run.

“I think if you’re trying to put together a championship club,” says Kevin Malone, the Orioles’ assistant general manager who as a general manager for the Expos watched Bonds in the National League, “you want to put power in the corner spots in both the infield and the outfield, and you want speed and defense up the middle. Now, if you’re talking about a Griffey, you’ve got speed and defense up the middle as well as power and batting average. That’s when you’re talking about a superstar.”

Baseball’s talent evaluators grade players on the basis of five skills--running speed, arm strength, defensive ability, hitting for average and hitting for power. Griffey scores the highest possible mark in all five categories. Bonds rates at the exceptional level in four of those skills. Arm strength is his only tool with an average grade. In his younger playing days, he compensated for his arm by playing shallow and counting on his speed to catch up to most balls hit to deep left. But by his own admission, he has been playing a little deeper in the last few seasons.

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It isn’t as if Bonds’ arm is weak; it’s just that he has a left fielder’s arm. Griffey’s wing is strong enough for him to play a deeper center field than nearly anyone in baseball and still keep baserunners from challenging him.

“I’ve never had a great arm,” Bonds says. “But it’s good enough to where if you run, I’ll get your ass. I ain’t no pushover out there. I’ll get you. If it’s an in-between play, you have a better shot than I do. But if it’s a play that I can get to quickly enough. . . . You don’t have to have a great arm if you get rid of the ball quick enough. I learned to get rid of it as quick as I can. I get it out of my hands, so when the runner rounds first and sees that ball in flight, it’s enough to freeze him. It doesn’t have to be coming in there fast.”

When Bonds reached the majors with the Pirates, he played some center field and might have stayed there if Pittsburgh hadn’t traded for Andy Van Slyke.

“If he’d stayed in center,” Pirates G.M. Cam Bonifay says, “he might have been a premier player there. But he just sort of settled into left. And there’s no question in my mind that he’s the best all-around left fielder in the game. He’s a pretty damn good player.”

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Bonds has won six Gold Gloves in left field in 11 seasons; Griffey has won seven Gold Gloves in center in eight. Pressed to make a choice, Bonifay chooses Griffey.

Bonds has certainly been more of a runner throughout his career than Griffey has been so far. Bonds will be remembered for becoming the second member of the 40-40 club last season--Jose Canseco, in 1988, is the other--when he hit 42 home runs and stole 40 bases for the Giants. He has attained the 30-30 plateau four times. His basestealing, more than anything else, sets him apart from the game’s other power hitters. Bonds says one of the reasons he expects Griffey’s career to outshine his is that Griffey isn’t wearing out his body on the basepaths like Bonds has done.

But Griffey has never been asked to steal bases in Seattle. In fact, the Mariners discourage a lot of risk-taking in the running game because their power-laden lineup (Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez, Buhner) doesn’t need to manufacture many runs. Scouts rate Griffey’s speed as exceptional, on a par with Bonds even if he hasn’t stolen more than 18 bases in a big-league season. On another team, his steal numbers might begin to match Bonds’.

In one of his few direct remarks about Bonds, with whom he has been friends since he was 17, Griffey says, “I see what everybody else sees about Barry: three MVPs, 40-40, 300 (nearly 400) career stolen bases. Barry is a great ballplayer. He runs. I just don’t run.”

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Bonds’ advocates in this “best all-around” discussion usually point to the relative strengths of the two players’ batting orders to buttress their argument for the Giants’ left fielder. Since the break up of the Pirates of the early ‘90s (Bonds, Van Slyke, Bobby Bonilla, Jeff King, Orlando Merced), Bonds hasn’t enjoyed the protection in the order that Griffey luxuriates in now with Seattle. And they have a point. His statistics last year (.308, 42 home runs, 129 RBI) are astonishing, given the fact that Matt Williams (22 home runs, 85 RBI) played only 105 games for San Francisco and no other Giant had more than 19 home runs and 67 RBI (Glenallen Hill put up those figures).

Bonds simply doesn’t see very many good pitches to hit. He set a National League record for most walks in a season last year with 151, a record he may break this year. (In his latest television commercial appearance, Bonds asks “The Baseball Detectives” to find a pitcher who will throw to him.) His hitting statistics are even more impressive coming in the National League, which for whatever reason s hasn’t produced the offensive explosion seen recently in the American League.

“The pressure has to be on Barry more than it is on Junior,” says Cubs center fielder Brian McRae, who played against Griffey in the A.L. during his five seasons with Kansas City. “You look at the players in the Mariners’ lineup, 1 through 9, and compare it to the players in the Giants’ lineup, 1 through 8, and you figure it’s a little bit easier to be the best all-around player in Seattle.”

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Darryl Hamilton, a career American League center fielder (eight years) until he joined the Giants this year, says his first two months with San Francisco have convinced him that the pitching is better in the National League. Hamilton also says he’s finding that National League managers are far more reluctant to challenge a team’s superstar than A.L. managers, meaning the best players in the N.L. are pitched around more often than the best players in the American League.

Williams, now playing for the Indians in the American League, agrees. Shortly after he hit five home runs in two days for Cleveland, Williams said he was surprised to find he still wasn’t being pitched around.

“Honestly, I don’t think Griffey could hit 50 home runs over here,” Hamilton says, “for the simple reason that he probably wouldn’t get the opportunity. He would be walked a hell of a lot more.”

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As well as Bonds dealt with the National League’s delicate approach to pitching to him last year, though, he hasn’t duplicated it so far in 1997. Seeing fewer and fewer hittable pitches has resulted this season in fewer and fewer hits. Bonds has averaged around .265 all year, and his home runs and RBI production are down dramatically.

Griffey, despite his lineup protection in Seattle, is still the one Mariner opposing managers and pitchers fear the most and the one Mariner to whom they’ll pitch the least. For that reason, Griffey’s presence benefits Rodriguez, Martinez and Buhner more than their presence profits Griffey. Overall, he may see better pitches to hit than Bonds does, but he has to play cat-and-mouse games with pitchers, nonetheless, as every other offensive superstar does. The great hitters such as Bonds and Griffey, says Giants manager Dusty Baker, are going to see only one pitch to hit per at-bat, regardless of their supporting cast.

Brewers pitcher Ben McDonald says, “When they need the big hit, Griffey’s the guy you’ve got to watch out for. That’s what all the pitching coaches tell you: ‘Don’t let Griffey beat you.’ ”

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Pitchers Scott Sanders and Jeff Fassero, both of whom joined the Mariners this season from National League teams, of necessity made a study of Bonds’ swing when they faced him regularly. Both, too, have watched Griffey’s swing through spring training and the first two months of the season. They haven’t had to pitch to Griffey, but he scares them, nonetheless.

“I think Junior has more of a pure swing than Bonds,” says Sanders, who had little success against Bonds (.400 batting average, three home runs and a 1.067 slugging percentage) in the N.L. “Junior has this beautiful arc, this long swing, whereas Bonds is a little more muscly. Bonds is choking up on the bat. Junior’s swing is so much prettier than Bonds’. Both of them can ruin a pitcher’s outing in a hurry, but I’d say Junior is the best all-around player I’ve seen. I’m lucky. I get to see him every day.”

They are, Fassero agrees, different types of hitters. In 22 at-bats against Fassero in the National League, Bonds hit .318 with one home run and four RBI, and he walked six times. Damn good numbers, but Fassero still likes Griffey in this comparison.

“From what I’ve seen so far, I’d have to say Junior,” Fassero says. “Junior keeps the bat through the zone a little longer. Barry doesn’t have the stride like Junior has. Junior’s swing is long. He’s longer than Barry, but he’s quick, too. You know, you see highlights of, say, Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle. They all had the same kind of long, quick swing, and that’s more what you see out of Junior.”