Barry Bonds: 762 Home Runs and an Unfinished Argument

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 8 min read

Barry Bonds hit 762 home runs, drew 2,558 walks and won seven MVP awards, then spent a decade on the Hall of Fame ballot without election. This profile lays out the numbers, the seasons and the argument.

Barry Bonds holds the two records that best summarize what a hitter can do: 762 career home runs and 73 in a single season. He also holds a third record that is less often quoted and is, in some ways, a better measure of how pitchers treated him, which is 2,558 career walks. Add seven Most Valuable Player awards, a career on-base percentage of .444 and a slugging percentage of .607, and the statistical case is one of the strongest the game has produced.

The case is also unfinished. Bonds was eligible for the Hall of Fame for ten years on the writers' ballot, peaked at 66 percent of the vote and was not elected, and later appeared before a veterans' committee. The argument about why is not mainly about his numbers. It is about the era in which he produced them and about the federal investigation that surrounded the second half of his career. This article follows the career in phases, gives the numbers from the historical record through the 2025 season, and tries to separate what is documented from what is disputed.

Riverside, Arizona State and the Pittsburgh years

Barry Lamar Bonds was born on July 24, 1964, in Riverside, California. He bats and throws left-handed and was listed at 73 inches and 185 pounds when he reached the majors. Baseball was the family business: his father, Bobby Bonds, hit 186 home runs for the San Francisco Giants between 1968 and 1974, and Willie Mays was his godfather. He played at Arizona State before debuting with the Pittsburgh Pirates on May 30, 1986.

The early Bonds was a leadoff-type talent with unusual power. In his first four full seasons he hit .223, .261, .283 and .248, which is nobody's idea of a future immortal, though he stole 36, 32, 17 and 32 bases and hit between 16 and 25 home runs. The turn came in 1990, when he hit .301 with 33 home runs, 114 runs batted in and 52 stolen bases, and won his first Most Valuable Player award. He won a second in 1992 with 34 home runs, 103 runs batted in and a .311 average. By the time he left the Pirates he had won two awards, three Gold Gloves in that stretch and a reputation as the best all-around player in the National League.

Pittsburgh won division titles in those years but could not reach the World Series, and Bonds became a free agent after the 1992 season.

San Francisco: the second act begins

He signed with the San Francisco Giants for 1993, returning to the club where his father had starred. The move started the long second act. In his first season there he hit .336 with 46 home runs and 123 runs batted in and won his third Most Valuable Player award. From 1993 to 1998 he hit between 33 and 46 home runs every full season, with averages from .291 to .336, and in 1996 he hit 42 home runs and stole 40 bases, a combination of power and speed that put him in the select 40-40 group.

His career totals for the first 14 seasons already placed him among the best of all time. He had passed 400 home runs and 400 stolen bases by the end of the 1990s, and he finished his career as the only player with more than 500 of each: 762 home runs and 514 stolen bases. A hitter who did that, with only 1,539 strikeouts in 9,847 at-bats, was valuable for far more than his power.

What changed after 1999

The record is unusual in what it did at the age at which most hitters decline. Bonds played only 102 games in 1999, hitting .262 with 34 home runs. Then from 2000 on, the home run rate climbed and kept climbing:

The 2001 season is the headline: 73 home runs, 137 runs batted in, a .515 on-base percentage and an .863 slugging percentage. He broke Mark McGwire's total of 70 from 1998, with Sammy Sosa second in the league at 64. The league's second-best home run hitter, in other words, was nine behind him. In 2002 he hit .370, the best average in the league, with 198 walks, 68 of them intentional.

The 2004 line is stranger still. He walked 232 times in 147 games, 120 of them intentionally, and posted a .609 on-base percentage; the next-highest walk total in the major leagues that year was 127. Pitchers had decided that the best way to handle him was not to pitch to him at all, and he was so dangerous that the plan cost them runs anyway.

The walks, and what they say

Walks are the part of the Bonds record that draws the least attention and holds up best under analysis. His 2,558 career walks are the most in the database, ahead of Rickey Henderson (2,190), Babe Ruth (2,062) and Ted Williams (2,021). His 688 intentional walks, counted in the years the database records them, are more than double the second-place total of 316, held by Albert Pujols.

The reason these totals matter is that walks measure something that cannot be bought or faked: how afraid the opposing manager is. An intentional walk, by definition, is the manager's own decision to concede a base rather than let a player hit. A career with 688 of them is a career in which managers made that concession again and again. The number also shows a cost to Bonds's counting stats. The 762 home runs came in 9,847 at-bats, and the walks, together with hit by pitch and sacrifices, mean he came to the plate far more than his at-bat total suggests.

On-base percentage is the tool that captures it. His career mark of .444 reflects walks and hits together, and his single-season marks of .515 in 2001, .582 in 2002 and .609 in 2004 stand beside the best in the sport's history. If you want to practice computing those numbers yourself, the stat calculator will do the arithmetic from a line of box score totals.

The late years and the chase of Aaron

His 2005 season was lost to injury; he appeared in 14 games and hit five home runs. He returned in 2006 and 2007 as a smaller version of himself, hitting .270 with 26 home runs in 130 games and then .276 with 28 in 126. In 2007 he passed Hank Aaron's career mark of 755. The 756th home run came on August 7, 2007, and he ended the season with 762. His last game was on September 26, 2007, and no club signed him afterwards.

The final tally of 762 stands first in the database list. Aaron has 755, Ruth 714, Pujols 703 and Alex Rodriguez 696. Aaron needed 12,364 at-bats to reach 755 while Bonds needed 9,847, a difference of more than 2,500 at-bats, though the comparison ignores the era in which each played.

The 2002 pennant and the postseason record

Bonds reached the postseason in seven different years, and in those series he played 48 games and hit .245 with nine home runs and 24 runs batted in, in 151 at-bats. The Giants reached the World Series in 2002, where they lost to the Anaheim Angels in seven games; that is the only World Series on his record. His Pittsburgh teams lost in the National League Championship Series in the early 1990s, and the 1992 series ended with a play at the plate that Pirates fans still remember. Those postseason numbers do not change the argument for the regular-season record, but they are fair to mention because they are the part of his résumé that does not match the rest.

The era, the investigation and the dispute

Any account of the Bonds years must deal with the era. In the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s, home run totals across the sport rose sharply, and several of the players at the top of the lists in those years were later connected to performance-enhancing drugs. A federal investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, known as BALCO, looked into the use of banned substances by athletes, and Bonds testified before a grand jury in 2003. He said he had used products he was told were harmless and did not knowingly take steroids. He was later prosecuted not for using drugs but for what he said in that testimony: in 2011 a jury convicted him on one count of obstruction of justice, and the conviction was overturned on appeal in 2015.

None of this changes the line of figures in the historical record, which records what happened on the field and not why. It also does not settle the Hall of Fame argument, because that argument is about a rule that voters apply: the Hall's guidelines ask voters to consider character, integrity and sportsmanship, in addition to playing record, and voters have read those words differently. To be careful: Bonds was never suspended by Major League Baseball for a positive test, and he has denied knowingly using steroids. What is documented is the testimony, the prosecution and the result of the appeal. What is alleged, and what readers believe about it, is a matter on which sources differ.

The Hall of Fame ballot

Bonds first appeared on the Baseball Writers' Association ballot in 2013, with 75 percent required. His percentages climbed over the decade, after a small dip in his second year:

The rise is a striking pattern. His vote total grew from 206 in 2013 to 260 in 2022 while the number of ballots cast fell by 175, which suggests that voters who had left the electorate were replaced by those more willing to support him, though that is an interpretation and not a fact in the table. He ended his ten years 36 votes short of election. The writers' eligibility ended after 2022, and in December 2022 the Contemporary Baseball Era committee, voting for the Class of 2023, considered him on a ballot of 16 members who needed 12 votes to elect; the database does not record the vote totals, and he was not elected. A later committee ballot is also listed in the database, again without an election.

The numbers, in one place

His career line reads 2,986 games, 9,847 at-bats, 2,227 runs, 2,935 hits, 601 doubles, 77 triples, 762 home runs, 1,996 runs batted in, 514 stolen bases and 2,558 walks, with a .298 average, .444 on-base percentage and .607 slugging percentage, an on-base plus slugging of 1.051. He won seven Most Valuable Player awards (1990, 1992, 1993, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), eight Gold Gloves, 12 Silver Sluggers and made 14 All-Star teams. After his playing career he spent a season as a hitting coach in the major leagues, and the Giants later retired his number.

Common questions

Did Bonds hit more home runs than Hank Aaron? Yes, 762 to 755, and in about 2,500 fewer at-bats, in an era with a different ball, different parks and different pitching. Neither fact settles who was the better hitter.

Why was he walked so often? Because he was more dangerous than the hitters behind him, because pitchers could not find a safe pitch to throw, and because managers decided that a free base was cheaper than the risk. The intentional walks (688 for his career, 120 in 2004) show that decision directly.

Is the 73-home-run season in doubt? It is in the official record. McGwire hit 70 in 1998, Sosa 66 that year, and Bonds hit 73 in 2001. Whether the record deserves an asterisk is an argument for the Hall of Fame and for fans, not a question that the database can settle.

Where does he rank among left fielders? The historical record has no wins above replacement, so it cannot give a single ranking. On batting alone, only a handful of players compare, and the other name in any discussion of the greatest hitters is Ted Williams, whom Bonds passed in career walks.

Where to go next

For other hitters of his era, read Ken Griffey, Frank Thomas and Mike Piazza, and for the pitching side of the same argument, Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez. To see how his postseason fits the format, how the MLB postseason works explains the rounds, and the history of baseball broadcasting shows how the 756th home run reached an audience. The career leaders page lets you compare his totals with anyone else's.