Monday, August 11, 2003
I'll drop in for a look at Bonds' chances at Aaron...
In these pages we have used Bill James' Favorite Toy projection method to estimate certain player's chances of passing home run milestones. Here were Barry's numbers going into this season:
Barry Bonds
Expected 99.9
End 2002 613
660 .97
700 .64
714 .49
756 .20
800 .03
OK, now let's go to the ESPN Barry Bonds page and note that he projects to 48 dingers this year. I expect that in the next two months his HR/PA will drop, while is BB/PA will soar as other teams pitch around him. In any case, let's go with 48 as the number of homers he will hit in 2003.
Yep, that would be a 661 career dingers. Love ya Willie.
That would also give an established rate of (3*48 + 2*46 + 73)/6 = 51.5. Barry will be 39 in 2004, so he's gone past the normal age formula, and we plug in 1.5 years for expected years left (I'm pretty sure Barry will last more than 1.5 more years). Bill James would expect Barry to hit 77 homers in the years following 2003.
OK, now for the math...
James went with (expected/needed) - 0.5 with a .97^n (where n is expected number of years required) limit when players are close.
To get to 700 dingers, we have 77/39 - 1/2, so obviously we go to the second formula and get .97^(39/51.5) = 97.7%
With the same math we get:
714 = 95.2%
756 = 31.1%
800 = 5.4%
My gut tells me that James' tool falls short in that it predicts too short a future for Barry. On the other hand, my gut also tells me that Barry will simply be setting the bar for Sammy. I'll leave those numbers as an exercise for the reader.
posted by David 12:36 PM
