“Is Barry Bonds the best baseball player of all time?”

This is about to become the million-dollar question in pro sports, which can’t be anything but good for Major League Baseball, as it will at least distract a bit from the other million-dollar question: “How did he get so big?”

Tying for third place on the career home-run list pretty much ensures that for a week or so at least, Bonds will be mentioned in the same sentence as Bambino more often than he’s mentioned in the same sentence as BALCO — thank God.

But how can the question be answered? Who is qualified to answer such a question?

Everyone’s got his or her own opinion. Historians have their opinions; statisticians have their opinions; baseball beat writers have their opinions; fans have their opinions.

It’s a tough question, though, and not one that can be answered without looking at it from all angles.

From a historical angle, the question is unanswerable. Bonds is certainly the best player of his generation, which is as much as anyone can claim historically. There have been a lot of attempts in recent years to come up with ways to compare players of different generations.

Basically what the process entails is taking into account just how abnormal a player’s accomplishments were to the era in which they were achieved and then to realign all of the player’s statistics to some sort of mystical historical void (i.e., if a person played at a point in time when not many homers were being hit, he gets more credit for the ones that he did hit).

The whole argument is garbage. Hitters change, pitchers change, balls change and ballparks change. This is a constant process, and pretending that one can understand the intricacies of it by looking at statistics is ridiculous. Is there a reason that no one has hit 50 homers the past couple of years? Yeah, there are about 300, and most of them can’t be quantified.

But Bonds has certainly been the best player while he’s been playing. He’s won more MVPs than anyone else, he’s put up better numbers than anyone else, and, from a purely subjective perspective, he’s been scarier to opponents than anyone else.

But where does that put the man historically? How does being the best hitter while he’s been around compare to Ted Williams or Babe Ruth or Willie Mays or any of the other players who were the best while they were around?

From a statistical angle, it’s hard not to notice that Bonds has done things that not many other baseball players have done. The 400-400 club has one member and it’s Bonds, who has crushed each of those milestones into the ground. Having 660 homers is another incredible stat. Three players in history hit that one before Bonds.

One stat that seems like it could have a differentiating effect is the win share, a number that’s gained a lot of prominence in baseball circles lately.

The win share is a stat that no one seems to be able to really explain in a coherent manner. As I understand it, it is how many games a player wins in a given year by himself. Now, while I don’t pretend to understand all the mathematical innovations in baseball, I do still, I believe, understand how the game is played. And as I understand the game, it still takes nine players to win any number of games — be it one or 162.

But while not many people understand the math behind a win share, everyone agrees that its creator deserves respect. Bill James is basically a fan with his own opinions who got so good at being a fan and had such groundbreaking, intelligent opinions that he was hired by the Boston Red Sox to be their fan and to tell all of that organization’s proven losers what his opinion is.

In terms of win shares, Barry Bonds has had a couple of the best seasons of all time and ranks up with names like Stan Musial, Ty Cobb, Mays and Hank Aaron in a clique of great ones solidly below Babe Ruth’s ridiculous career numbers.

And really, that’s what this argument comes down to. Is anyone, or will anyone ever be, good enough to mention in the same breath as Babe?

Well, let’s take a statistic that isn’t too complicated to compare them. In terms of a player’s on-base percentage plus his slugging percentage (his OPS — essentially how good he is at getting on base plus how good he is at hitting for power), a 1.000 mark for a season is considered great. A 1.200 mark is considered so great it’s almost unachievable. Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Hammerin’ Hank and Willie never broke 1.200. The Mick came pretty close two or three times but never quite made it over.

Barry Bonds has broken the mark three times now and Ted Williams broke it five times in his war-shortened career.

Babe Ruth’s career number was 1.164. For his career, he almost broke a mark that most players can’t even imagine — that the greatest players dream of breaking only once. Historical context doesn’t seem to mean much when such an overwhelming number comes into play.

So is Barry Bonds the best player of all time?

Nah. That spot’s been taken for a while.

But he’s pretty close, and that ain’t bad.