TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Saturday, September 18, 2004

League Leaders and Milestones: Homeruns

I thought a little bit about the remarks The Crank made about what sort of stats are the type that someone can achieve career milestones the same year they were among the league leaders. Ultimately I think this phenomenon will be fairly independent of the type of statistic, and here's why. Let's formulate the problem in the following way:

M = milestone in question for whatever category
N = eventual career total for a player in the same category

It should be obvious that the smaller M/N is, the more likely the player will also be among the league leaders during the season he achieves M. To take one specific example, it should make sense that Hank Aaron would have a much better chance at being among the league leaders in homers the year he hit 500 (M/N = 0.66) than Eddie Murray (M/N = 0.99). This reasoning should hold up for any sort of counting statistic that breaks into the hundreds, I'd think.

Let's take a look at all the guys with at least 500 career homers and see how they did the years they achieved 500, 600, or 700. I'll give a name, the particular milestone achieved, the year he achieved it, where the guy finished if in the Top 5 (which is the cutoff for the archival data at baseball-reference.com), the league leader & league-leading total, and M/N. In order of career homers to date:

Aaron/500/1968/29/#5/McCovey@36/0.66
Aaron/600/1971/47/#2/Stargell@48/0.79
Aaron/700/1973/40/#4/Stargell@44/0.93

Ruth/500/1929/46/#1/--/0.70
Ruth/600/1931/46/T1/Gehrig/0.84

Bonds/500/2001/73/#1/--/0.71
Bonds/600/2002/46/#2/Sosa@49/0.86
Bonds/700/2004/43/#3/Beltre@45/0.999

Mays/500/1965/52/#1/--/0.76

Robinson/500/1971/28/T5/Melton@33/0.85

McGwire/500/1999/65/#1/--/0.86

Killebrew/500/1971/28/T5/Melton@33/0.87

Palmeiro/500/2003/38/T5/Rodriguez@47/0.91

Foxx/500/1940/36/#2/Greenberg@41/0.94

Ott/500/1945/21/T4/Holmes@28/0.98

The real surprise is Ott sneaking in there in 1945. Foxx had a fairly dramatic drop off in his performance at the end of his career, and then everyone else on the list will have at least 550 career homers, at which point M/N = 0.91. If I may generalize from this case, it seems clear that for M/N < 0.9 there's a decent chance that someone can bag that milestone and be among the league leaders the year the milestone is bagged. In the case of homers, the only M/N < 0.9 milestones that are missing from the league leaders the year they occurred are #500 for Sosa and Jackson. If Sammy reclaims his slugging form next season he could be in the somewhat odd position of not being top-5 in homers the year he hit 500 but top-5 the year he hit 600. That's a pretty big if, though. Also note that Bonds hit nos. 500, 600, and 700 in 2001, '02, and '04, respectively. Yikes.

posted by Tom Renbarger 7:12 PM