TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, August 14, 2003

A Day at the Park
I went to see the Oakland A's with my friend Ben today. We were too late for BP, so no good photos, just a bunch shot from the upper deck. It was cool to see Tim Wakefield pitch. Nothing like pitches in the 60s showing up on the radar gun.

Just a side note... The first vending stand I went to didn't have hotdogs ready. "Come back in ten minutes" they told me. How can you screw that one up? I went to the second vending stand, and was in line behind a pair of old people. When they got near to the front of the line they asked each other what they wanted and got into an argument. Right before they were to be served, they were so mad at each other that they decided not to eat. That was kind of bizarre.

Parking was $12 and my ticket was $8. That's also bizarre.

posted by David 8:40 AM

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

One more data point on the Bonds-Aaron issue. Barry knocked out number 650 last night, and ESPN has provided the following numbers:

Span between #600 and #650

	Games	AB
Bonds	145	437
Ruth	155	542
Aaron	166	597
Mays	339	1081

Quite clearly, Willie was done. Bonds Ruth and Aaron still had gas in their tanks, and Bonds compares well to the other two. An interesting question would be the time Ruth and Aaron took from 650 to 700...

posted by David 11:14 AM

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

Sunday, August 10, 2003

There are a couple of things that might derail Bonds's pursuit of Aaron. The biggest unknown as I see it is whether the reflexes that make Barry the baddest man on the baseball planet will start to age in dog years as he reaches 40. Historically, the closest analogs might be Ted Williams and Aaron himself. Williams hit .388 in 1957 as a 39-year-old before hitting the wall. Aaron hit 40 homers in 1973, also at age 39, after setting his career high in homers two years earlier with 47 in '71. His homer totals in his final three seasons were 20, 12, and 10 before he retired in '76. Barry needs to buck that trend to get past Aaron.

The other thing is that Barry is already good for sitting out 10-15% of his team's games. Is that number going to stay the same or increase as Bonds enters his forties? If he starts to need a day off every fifth or even fourth game, then you are talking about 120-130 games played a year for the fortysomething Bonds. If he can keep his skills up this only delays the inevitable, but the longer it takes the more chance there is for a debilitating injury in the meantime.

We can look to a couple of examples from the NFL and NBA in Jerry Rice and Michael Jordan as guys who once ruled their sport but accepted playing at a C/C- All-Star level when they were 40. If Barry is willing to accept a similar transition in his status, I think he still has the drive to put himself in position to catch Aaron sometime around his 42nd birthday.

posted by Tom Renbarger 1:27 PM

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Whispers are starting to get louder about Barry Bonds and the possibility of him breaking Hank Aaron's career HR record of 755. Bonds is 107 HR away from the record, and considering that he's hit his "prime" in terms of his power in the last three years, it's not out of the question by any means. Barring any kind of injury in the next two years, he could do it. He has 35 this year, and my guess is that he'll end up somewhere close to 50. That puts him about 92 away, meaning two years of 46 dingers. That's definitely in reach for a 39-year-old who has hit 49, 73, 46 HRs in the last three seasons, plus whatever he hits this year, which is already 35 and counting.

So the question must be asked: will it happen? I'd like to see if my colleagues agree, but I believe that Bonds can do it...except for one factor. He's not getting as many pitches to hit with everyone pitching around him (a mind-boggling 198 BB last year), and you can bet no one wants to give up 756. Even though he was walked 198 times last year, he still hit 46 homers. So I wonder if pitchers will start walking him even more (if that's humanly possible). But at the rate Bonds is going now, I think it's within his reach

posted by Charles Curtis 8:56 AM