If a ballplayer has more than 400 doubles, 400 home runs, 400 stolen bases and on-base average above .400, he's a lock for the Hall of Fame.

Barry Bonds is the only one in baseball history who has managed that.

That's the juice, you say?

No. Bonds had reached all those plateaus by 1998, before his visit to Planet BALCO, before the transformation that will change the way we look at him forever.

As a new baseball season begins with Bonds closing on Babe Ruth in home runs and few believing the past six years have been legit, let's take a moment to remember a great player who could run like Luis Aparicio and hit like Frank Robinson.

We'll use Bill James' similarity scores, available on www.baseball-reference.com. When comparing players, James starts with 1,000 points and then drops points based on statistical differences: one point dropped for each difference in 15 hits, one point for each 10 RBIs, one point for two home runs, one for 20 stolen bases, and so on.

Thus we mark the progress of Bonds, a hitter who started like Jack Clark and became Babe Ruth.

Bonds won his first Most Valuable Player Award in 1990 at age 25, and his body of work after five seasons was a good match for what Jack Clark had done a decade before for the Giants. Both had more than 100 home runs and 300 RBIs at that age, and the James similarity score had them matched at 954 on a scale of 1,000.

Bonds was pulling away from almost every comparable player in stolen bases, though. By age 27, when Bonds won his second MVP, he resembled no one so much as his old man. At 943 points, Bonds would never be so close to another player again as he was to Bobby Bonds at age 27.

At ages 28 and 29, Barry Bonds' career stats match closely with Greg Luzinski's and Shawn Green's, which seems crazy now. After Bonds turned 30 late in 1994, his list of peers became a Cooperstown directory.

Bonds and Duke Snider are close career mates from ages 30 to 32. At 33, Bonds' top five matches are Frank Robinson, Duke Snider, Ken Griffey Jr., Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle.

By then, Bonds had three MVPs and eight Gold Gloves. None of these all-time greats were within 175 steals of him, but Bonds was a relative laggard on the HR list: Griffey, 481; Mantle, 473; Mays, 453; Robinson, 450; Bonds, 411; Snider, 368.

That is Bonds through 1998. Griffey, obviously, moved into this home run neighborhood later, as did players such as Jim Thome (423 HR at age 33) and Sammy Sosa (499). But we'll take a statistical snapshot of Bonds here because the book "Game of Shadows," by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, says Bonds hired personal trainer Greg Anderson after the 1998 season. Anderson would later plead guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering.

Bonds has been a different player since 1999.

That flaxseed oil must really work.

Bonds' few statistical kinfolk were no match for him in their late 30s. Here's how they look from age 34 on:

Mantle and Snider, shadows of the players they had been, retired at 36 and 37. Robinson and Mays hung in for seven and nine more seasons, remaining great players for part of that time, but there was nothing Bondsian about them.

Bonds' godfather, Mays, has the career numbers most like Bonds through age 40, and Ruth, Robinson, Hank Aaron and Rafael Palmeiro (who tested positive for steroids last year) are reasonably close, too. Let's look only at what the two players with more home runs than Bonds did from age 34 on:

Both remained great players, but Ruth's slugging average was 56 points below his previous work. He retired at 40. Aaron's slugging dropped 32 points. He retired at 42.

Only Bonds, who turns 42 this July, found a way to reverse time, upping his slugging average by 200 points.

Make of that what you will.

We know two things. Barry Bonds will be a controversial topic for as long as people talk baseball, and the brilliant, uniquely gifted ballplayer that Bonds was in his first 13 seasons will forever be obscured by The Man From BALCO.