SAN FRANCISCO — Barry Bonds was in his usual spot on most game days, in conversation with one of the Giants’ hitters in the batting cages behind the third-base dugout at Oracle Park, when he let slip a slice of the confidence that made him MLB’s all-time home run king and one of the most feared hitters in history.
“This,” Bonds, 60, told the hitter before they hosted the Dodgers, “is the team I’d like to come out of retirement to face.”
The last of Bonds’ 762 home runs came in 2007, and he isn’t sauntering into the left-handed batter’s box again. A decade and a half into retirement, though, Bonds is spending an increasing amount of time around the ballpark and taking a growing interest in the Giants’ current group of hitters.
When the Giants are home, more often than not Bonds is down below, dispensing advice.
“He’s been more than hands-on with a lot of the guys,” said first baseman LaMonte Wade Jr. “Just being here, you start to talk to him a lot. Learn a lot of things. You take away a lot of things from him. He’s been great with the team.”
More than a dozen hitters and other members of the organization interviewed for this story described specific tips, personalized advice and genuinely meaningful interactions that could only come from someone digesting just as much film as them.
“He watches,” third baseman Matt Chapman said. “He pays attention.”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever had the same conversation twice,” outfielder Mike Yastrzemski said. “There’s always something different or something new. It’s moving forward. There’s always something to work on, to be focused on.”
Officially, Bonds is listed as a special advisor to CEO Larry Baer. But in reality, he has served as almost an informal fourth hitting coach, in conjunction with Pat Burrell, Justin Viele and Pedro Guerrero. While he would drop by in the past, working with individual players, his presence has been more frequent this season — almost any night game — and his work more refined to fit within the group’s overall strategy.
Part of that, sources said, was a more receptive attitude from the new regime under manager Bob Melvin, who also added former Giants players in Burrell and Matt Williams to his coaching staff and reinstated the tradition of inviting franchise legends to lend a hand in spring training.
“He’s Barry Bonds,” Melvin said. “He’s very, very passionate about hitting. He doesn’t push, but if you want information from him, he’s there to give it. He loves the Giants. He loves the Bay Area. It’s just great to have a resource like that around.”
Despite playing American Legion ball against each other as teenagers growing up on the Peninsula, Melvin didn’t have an existing relationship with Bonds. They met when Bonds came down to Scottsdale during spring training, and Melvin extended the olive branch.
“It just felt natural once I talked to him, and I just wanted to let him know that he had my blessing here and we want him around as much as he can,” Melvin said. “We talked a little about what the dynamic might be. I said, ‘Look, you’re welcome any day, any time, anywhere. We’d love to have you here.’ I think he felt good about that. And he’s there a lot, which is fantastic.”
It has led to some pinch-me moments for even the most established big leaguers.
“It’s an interesting group of guys that grew up watching him smash all the records,” outfielder Michael Conforto said. “We were in Little League at the time. We all have the same stories about watching him on TV. … I think I was on a travel ball trip sitting in a hotel room with my dad when he ended up breaking the record. It was Griffey and Barry for me, left-handed power guys. I wanted to swing like them.”
Before signing with San Francisco, Chapman wasn’t aware Bonds hung around but called it a “nice surprise.”
“The first time just seeing him, I was like, what? I felt like a little kid,” he said. “That’s somebody that I idolized growing up. He’s the greatest hitter of all time, at least in my opinion.”
Barry Bonds talks with San Francisco Giants third baseman Matt Chapman in the batting cage before one of their games at Oracle Park. (Evan Webeck / Bay Area News Group)
For as much time Bonds as logs in the cage these days, it pales in comparison to the hours he put in during his playing career, when he would call up John Yandle at all hours to throw him batting practice. Yandle, who has a day job in commercial real estate, is in his 40th season as the Giants’ left-handed batting practice pitcher.
“For Barry, nothing came without practice, without conditioning, without doing all the other things,” he said. “It is a god-given talent, but you can’t just rely on that or he never would have been the player he was. The mental part of the game was big. Where everybody thinks of Barry as being this big home run hitter – which he was – there was still a very strategic part of his game that he thought through every day.”
In his playing days, Bonds was known for his intense demeanor, but as Yandle watches him talk hitting now, “he’s still very confident. He still realizes what he’s accomplished. He’s all that. But I think he’s softened a little bit. … I think that’s good for him. I think he needed to soften a bit, and he has.”
That said, Yastrzemski also had the opportunity to work with his Hall of Fame grandfather, Carl Yastrzemski, and said the biggest similarity was their “intensity.”
Bonds hasn’t been afraid to take a hands-on approach.
Before he was traded, the hulking Jorge Soler, at 6-foot-4 and 235 pounds, said he knew Bonds was stronger “because when Barry comes over and wants to show you where to hit the ball, he grabs your hand and then he hits you with his hand where you’re supposed to make contact. You can feel the strength on him.”
Melvin said Bonds “really enjoys” working with the group of young hitters the Giants are breaking in this season, including Heliot Ramos. After the 25-year-old outfielder slugged his 18th home run of the year back in August, Bonds pulled him aside.
“He said, ‘You owe me seven, (expletive)! You gotta hit 25!’ I’m like, ‘I got you.’ Then I hit 20 and he said how much do you owe me? I was like, ‘Five’ and he was like, ‘You’d better get them! Make me happy!’” said Ramos, who enters the final weekend with 22 homers. “He always pushes us and wants us to do better.”
Joc Pederson and Blake Sabol both discussed working with Bonds before their big games the previous two seasons. But in Sabol’s case, he said, “he was there for a couple days and I was too scared to talk to him. When I was hitting the cages, I was trying so hard to impress him, so I’m swinging hard.
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“Finally on the second or third day that he’s watching me, he’s like, ‘God dammit, Sabol! You’re way too (expletive) talented to be swinging that (expletive) hard!’ I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ But then I was like, ‘Oh! He said I was talented!’ And he ended up coming in the cage with me.”
That night, Sabol left the yard twice in the first multihomer game of his career.
The other results have not been as pronounced, as the Giants rank near the middle of the pack in most offensive metrics. Their bats came alive while going 7-2 on their most recent road trip but have been so inconsistent in timely situations that it has led to questions about the job status of their three hitting coaches.
Melvin stood behind Burrell, Viele and Guerrero in recent comments to The Athletic. Bonds served as the hitting coach in Miami for one season, in 2016, which he later described as “one of the most rewarding experiences of my baseball career,” but has never taken another formal coaching role.
“I think he’s comfortable doing what he’s doing,” Melvin said. “He’s been great with our hitting guys, too. He understands what they’re trying to implement. It can be a delicate process when you have three guys, and now there’s another guy in there. But he’s handled it really well.”