A 2003 Favorite Toy Update for Career Homersby David Marasco A few years back we looked at "Favorite Toy" predictions for home runs. Bill James made up a rough-and-ready prediction system he called the "favorite toy." The idea was to predict if a player could hit a certain milestone in a given stat. Suppose that Joe Ballplayer was at 2500 hits, what were his chances at getting to 3000? James reasoned that if you could be expected to get 500 hits based upon your previous stats, then you had a 50/50 chance of getting those 500 hits. In more general terms, he set the probability of getting to a certain milestone as (expected/needed) - 0.5. In other words, if you could be expected to get 50 more home runs, and you needed 100 for the milestone, then you had a 50/100- 0.5 = 25% chance of doing so. But how many events could be expected? James realized that there were two components to this. The first was a rate, and he felt that a weighted average of (3*last year + 2* one year prior + 1* two years prior)/6 was the proper rate. In addition to this, James estimated remaining career by assuming that a 20-year-old had 12 years left, and subtracted .6 years for each year actually used. In other words, a 30-year-old has used 10 years, so subtract 6 from 12 to get an additional 6 years expected in the career. You never have fewer than 1.5 years left, no matter what your age. Here we use the age the player was on July 1. As a limiter to extreme cases (both due to young players and players very close to the milestones), James included a .97^n ceiling where n is the number of years the player would need to play at the established rate. Here we've taken the home run numbers for a selection of players from the 2003 season. From there we've used Favorite Toy to estimate their odds for various homerun milestones.
Barry's place with the greats is already well-established. Who knows how many homers he will hit if they actually pitch to him? Guts tell us that the Favorite Toy underestimates the time remaining on Barry's career, and hence these percentages are also too low.
Sammy's numbers on the high end are starting to come back to earth, but he's not done, not by a longshot.
Manny more or less kept pace with expectations, so the long-run numbers didn't change much. But his odds of hitting 500 shot through the roof.
A-Rod with a 38% chance of hitting 800 dingers? It seems crazy, but he's been hitting about 50 a year, and ten years from now would place the youngster in his mid-late 30s. If he stays healthy, he can take advantage of the DH rule to set records that will never be broken. That's what we wrote last year, and not much has changed.
Vlad's back bumped down his projections quite a bit from last year.
Yeah, the new kid. It seems kind of silly to project when he's a mere 600 dingers behind Ruth, but what the heck?
Ken Griffey Jr. and Rafael Palmeiro have been dropped from this year's update :(
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