Who is the best baseball player of all time?

Barry Bonds, even without a bat, would rank as one of the best ever

Question: Who is the best baseball player of all time?
Position‹3 of 5›: Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player ever
Argument1 of 2›: Barry Bonds, even without a bat, would rank as one of the best ever

Through Bonds' career, the fear of how frequently he could hit home runs so fervently consumed his pitching adversaries that, even without a bat, he would still put up all-time historical prestige.

The argument

The sheer surrounding fear and anxiety a baseball player can induce in the player pitching against him factors into the will he machinates over the game, and Barry Bonds is completely unparalleled in this respect. Fear of a hitter is not an intangible in baseball; it is recorded, because a pitcher who does not want to face a batter has a way of declining, and that decision leaves a mark in the statistics. Bonds possesses the all-time records for bases on balls/walks (2,558) and intentional bases on balls (688). The two records measure slightly different things and point the same way. The walk total records how often pitchers refused to throw him anything he could hit, working so carefully around the edges of the strike zone that they lost the batter rather than risk him. The intentional total records the extreme version of the same judgement, in which the pitcher does not even pretend to compete and simply concedes first base. This means that, without even holding a bat and swinging, Bonds would have still gained an enormous amount of bases every time he stepped up to the plate. Reaching base is the most basic thing a hitter is there to do, and he did it without swinging more often than anyone in the history of the game. Pitchers would rather have intentionally walked him 688 times than give him the chance to knock one out of the park, as he did so often. His BB and IBB statistics tell a story in themselves, suggesting that he was the most feared slugger in the history of baseball. On that evidence alone, before any of his hitting is counted, Bonds would rank as one of the best ever.

Premises

[P1]The fear Bonds induced in pitchers is unparalleled: he holds the all-time records for walks (2,558) and intentional walks (688), meaning pitchers repeatedly chose to put him on base rather than risk his bat. [P2] Those figures show that even without swinging, Bonds would gain an enormous number of bases every time he came to the plate, marking him as the most feared slugger in baseball history. [C] Because his walk records alone would rank him among the best ever, Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player ever.

Counter-arguments

Fear of a player does not automatically equate to a player's greatness. Simply because Bonds holds the records for BB and IBB does not make him the greatest of all time, nor does it mean that he is the most feared player to pick up a bat. Fear is a subjective emotion that cannot be quantified through statistical analysis, so to translate supposed "fear" into all-time excellence and skill is illogical. Many players can be feared by pitchers for different reasons, and Barry Bonds' batting performance and the attitudes of the pitchers he faced are not necessarily related.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Fear is unidentifiable in statistics, and arbitrary "fear" of a player does not automatically guarantee his level of greatness. [Rejecting P2] He broke the records not solely because of pitchers' apprehension towards him. [Rejecting P3] Barry Binds is not the greatest player of all time based on the first two premises.

Framing

Being the greatest of all time means telling a whole story simply from the numbers, that story being how absolutely terrified pitchers were of Barry Bonds' hitting ability. The all-time records show a level of fear never seen before in baseball, and has not been seen since.