Congratulations to Barry Bonds on 589 Career Home Runs!

I'm not questioning Bonds' use of steroids, HGH, cream, clear, whatever.
I'm questioning a stupid formula that says he "should have " hit 589 home runs.

 

i hate fat bill as much as you. his shit dehumanizes the game for the simple reason of helping math geeks feel good about themselves.

 

Derek Jeter dating back to 2001: Based on his age, your player can be expected to play for 8 more years, at an average of 207.3 per year. At that rate, he will finish at 2666.7 for his career. He has a 33.3 percent chance to reach 3000.

 

Obviously, like any prediction tool, this one is imperfect. It's fun but ultimately inaccurate.

However I doubt we could do a whole lot better just by educated guesses. My educated guess was 600 homers, and this thing spit out 589, 11 less.

In any event, I think we'll be doing a lot of this in the years to come, whether we use this tool or not. I wouldn't vote for McGwire, Sosa, or Palmeiro largely due to the "performance absent the enhancement" test.

 

I'm not threateneed in the least Buck.
Some of it is of great value. Some of it -- like James' nonsensical projection formula or winshares or VORP -- is pure bullshit.

 

jesus buck, just because we think it's bullshit you claim we're threatened by it?

that's kinda shitty.

 

Buck: when I was still covering baseball, I got a complimentary of the first Bill James Abstract in like '82 or '83 (don't tell write_nrained that I kept it and never paid for it).
I found a lot of the stuff very interesting for comparing players of different eras, for looking at different ways to measure a players value to his team.
But where it's gone from there has become a bit absurd to me.

 

2007: Dodgers over Red Sox
2008: Red Sox over Cubs
2009: Cubs over White Sox
2010: Yankees over Dodgers
2011: Dodgers over Yankees
2012: Dodgers over Red Sox
2013: Dodgers over Columbus Clippers (baseball institutues futbol's "relegation" and demotes worst team to AAA and promotes AAA champion; fans love it)
2014: Columbus Clippers over Nationals
2015: Nationals over Orioles
2016: ???

 

Sorry, Xan, but Pythagoras would never let the Cubs win the World Series.

 

Bill James is nothing more or less a geek with way to much time on his hands and a slight passion for screwing the game of baseball. The organizations that rely on his b.s never win world series because they discount sac bunts, sac flies and general good baseball. They make the argument that a strikeout is more important then a contact out. This same type of bull is spreading into basketball and football possibly making coaches decisions based on number not on actual real play. This type of thing would tell you that players like David Eckstein should not be in the major and that players like Trot Nixon is a star because he takes an ungodly amount of pitches. Has it ruined baseball, ask the Oakland A's how many World Series titles they have won since they started loving Bill James. Pure and simple those that know REAL baseball don't need these complex and bull formulas and theories.

 

Oh, I agree that a lot of it is quite out of my realm. I'm not a mathematician, and I don't need abstract statistics to help me appreciate baseball.

That said, I like that there are so many different ways to look at baseball ... if you want to. I wasn't alive during the days when the only game on TV was NBC's Game of the Week. I was around, however, when the only stats anybody paid much attention to were the Triple Crown stats.

And I think it's great that more type of people -- mathematically inclined or not -- can appreciate baseball in different ways than they could 25 years ago. So whether the specific numbers they come up with are bullshit or not, I like the fact that they're trying.

That can be directly attributed to Bill James.

 

You might be right. OK, I'll revise:

Columbus Clippers over the Cubs