How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

[Speedy]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

be my guest. The statements is true though. The 2003 survey on who was taking performance enhancers was supposed to be completely anonymous and it should have never gotten out to the press due to the fact that it was not supposed to be released

I was hoping you would say you were being sarcastic.

[Evan_OS]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

Well, Longhorn is Boston fan so immediately we know his opinion is null and void

All kidding aside, it would be nice if someone who didn't take steroids had the record. But, we can't control that.

That would be great. Taking steroids doesn't take away credit in my opinion, but it would be nice to have someone with the record who didn't use them.

[SlimKibbles]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

I mean really People baseball was originated as a game. Games are meant to be fun no one on these fourms can tell me they did not have fun and were not entertained by players such as Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa or Alex Rodriguez. Despite taking Roids to me it does not take away from any one of these guys personal achievements because, The fact that they ever took steroids was never supposed to go to the press

What a bizarre thing to say. I see you're in the camp of, "'Roid up and entertain me." Okay, that's fine. So are baseball players just entertainers to you, like wrestlers, or are they athletes?

[24]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

What a bizarre thing to say. I see you're in the camp of, "'Roid up and entertain me." Okay, that's fine. So are baseball players just entertainers to you, like wrestlers, or are they athletes?

ok i think my opinion was taken a bit the wrong way. Baseball is My life i play it watch it, study it hell i worship baseball as if it was a god. but truth be told while in today's world baseball is a buisness it is meant to be a game we are supposed to be entertained by games so why not enjoy it. Yes while i do agree cheating is wrong the question is did you personally enjoy watching Bonds or Mcgwire slugging 500 foot homers? I certainly enjoyed it The display the roiders put up was incredible so they boosted their performance a bit by taking something it would not be the first time. Steroids were being taken long before the 90's in fact they go back to the days of the 1960's.

read this article just one of the prime examples of this

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/7721721

Mickey Mantle an idolized hero was injected with steroids by a quack doctor at one point due to the severity of his past injuries yet that does not take away any of his reputation so why should it with players like A-rod and bonds.

also this thread can use a lock it has gone completely off topic.

[12]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

why is that unfortunate? Because he took Steroids? I really could give two Sh!ts less if he took roids along witht he other players in the mlb. I mean really People baseball was originated as a game. Games are meant to be fun no one on these fourms can tell me they did not have fun and were not entertained by players such as Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa or Alex Rodriguez. Despite taking Roids to me it does not take away from any one of these guys personal achievements because, The fact that they ever took steroids was never supposed to go to the press

Say what?

[12]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

To answer the question; I think Rodriguez finishes his career with 750+ HR.

My problem with steroids is simple... They are illegal. By the laws of our land, they are an illegal substance. I don't care to debate whether or not they improve performance or not -- the bottom line is that they are illegal and MLB players should not get a pass.

[RandyMoss84]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

Based on what?

Its what I think, Bonds was a freak and is unmatched

and PECOTA analysis and projections

Monday, February 23, 2009
Updated: February 26, 9:52 AM ET
BP Daily: A-Rod likely to miss HR mark
By Nate Silver
Baseball Prospectus

We're less than two years removed from Barry Bonds' somber, strange and soulless quest to break Henry Aaron's lifetime home run record. It was a spectacle most sports fans -- even the few like me who were relatively sympathetic toward Bonds' plight -- would go to great lengths to avoid experiencing again.

Unfortunately, it seems history is getting ready to repeat itself. Alex Rodriguez already has hit 553 home runs, by far the most for a player who just completed his age-32 season. He needs only 203 more to surpass Aaron and 210 to best Bonds. Rodriguez has hit an average of 42 home runs per season since joining the New York Yankees in 2003. If he maintains that pace, he'll overtake Bonds' mark on the last day of the 2013 season. And he seems to have plenty of time to spare, being under contract with the Yankees through 2017.
But player haters can rejoice: Rodriguez's breaking the career home run record is nowhere near the foregone conclusion it appears to be. The reason boils down to that fine print you ignored when you invested your daughter's college fund in Citibank stock a few years ago: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Rodriguez certainly has been among the best players in baseball over the past couple of years. And chemically enhanced or not, there are a lot of indicators that ordinarily would be favorable toward his continuing to perform well. Among them:

All-around athleticism. Rodriguez is far from a one-dimensional player. At an age when most guys refrain from challenging themselves on the basepaths, he still averages about 20 stolen bases a year. He plays a fairly difficult defensive position and plays it pretty well. He is a complete hitter, able to draw walks and hit for average as well as aim for the fences. Multidimensional players, generally speaking, age better than unidimensional ones.

The Benjamin Button Principle. This is the concept that the beginning of a player's life sometimes resembles the end -- guys who start their careers with a bang sometimes tend to end it that way. Rodriguez, who arguably was already the best player in baseball by the age of 20, started his career like few others in history; he has a better-than-usual chance of finishing it that way.

Perverse Incentives, Part I. Rodriguez stands to make a $30 million bonus if he breaks the all-time home run record. If he gets close, those are 30 million reasons for him to extend his career until he does, rather than consider early retirement.
On the other hand, another set of indicators implies uncertainty in Rodriguez's future:

The aging curve. The steepest part of the aging curve -- when a hitter experiences the most decline in his abilities -- tends to come between ages 32 and 34. Rodriguez, who turned 33 this past July, now is about halfway through that period. And he hasn't come away completely unscathed. He hit 30 home runs in the first half of the 2007 season and 24 in the second half, then 19 home runs in the first half of the 2008 season but 16 after the break. That could be just a fluke -- or it could mean he has started on a fairly steep downward trajectory.

Injury risk. Although Rodriguez generally has been the picture of health, that trend somewhat reversed itself in 2008, when he missed 24 games, the most in any season since 1999. Injury problems sometimes can be compounding, especially when a player reaches his mid-30s. There also is some anecdotal evidence that players who have experimented with steroids are more inclined to have chronic injury problems.

Perverse Incentives, Part II. Unless he was investing with Bernie Madoff, Rodriguez already has all the money he'll need for life, and it's highly unlikely he'll ever be on the market again. Most of us, given a guaranteed salary for the next nine years that requires us to do nothing other than show up and put on a uniform, might become somewhat lackadaisical in our work habits. Many professional athletes are different -- but others aren't.

The favorable and unfavorable indicators are reflected to some degree in Rodriguez's series of PECOTA comparables. His list includes many Hall of Famers, such as Dave Winfield, George Brett, Frank Robinson, Reggie Jackson, Tony Perez and Hank Aaron himself, who were elite athletes late into their 30s or even their early 40s.
But it also includes some other players whose careers did not end all that gracefully. First are the guys who succumbed to injury, like Jeff Bagwell and Albert Belle. Next are a couple of players who, like Rodriguez, were known or suspected to use performance-enhancing drugs: Sammy Sosa is A-Rod's No. 1 comparable, for instance, and Ken Caminiti his No. 4. Finally, there are players like Ryne Sandberg whose skills simply atrophied sooner or more suddenly than expected.

Chasing Bonds

Will Alex Rodriguez catch Barry Bonds? A PECOTA-based analysis doesn't think so.

A-Rod yearly projections
Season Home Runs Career
2009 33 586
2010 30 616
2011 27 643
2012 25 668
2013 18 686
2014 16 702
2015 12 714
2016 8 722
2017 4 726
2018 3 729
2019 1 730

I took Rodriguez's top 20 PECOTA-comparable players and averaged their performances over each remaining season of their careers. Actually, the process was a little more complicated than that (each comparable's performance was adjusted for his park and league context, as well as his previous track record, and we had to make an accommodation for guys like Manny Ramirez who made A-Rod's comparables list but have yet to conclude their own careers). But the basic idea is simple: Comparables like Frank Robinson, who aged well, have a favorable effect on Rodriguez's forecast, and players like Caminini just the opposite one.

PECOTA's best guess is that Rodriguez will finish with 730 lifetime home runs, running out of steam after another three or four seasons and leaving him just shy of the marks established by Aaron and Bonds. Of course, there is a lot of uncertainty in this estimate. If Rodriguez follows the path charted by Aaron or Frank Robinson, he could finish with well in excess of 800 home runs (and possibly as many as 900). On the other hand, if he draws Albert Belle's ping-pong ball, he might not top 600. Overall, the system puts Rodriguez's chances of surpassing Aaron at only about four in 10 and of surpassing Bonds closer to three in 10.

One needs to remember the ways Aaron and Bonds finished out their careers were far from typical. At least as common are folks like Jimmie Foxx (before Rodriguez, the fastest player to 500 home runs), who hit just 34 home runs after turning 33. Only about a dozen players have hit 200 or more home runs from their age-33 seasons onward; Bonds and Aaron are the only two to have hit at least 300.
In other words, Rodriguez still has his work cut out for him if he wants to pass Bonds and Aaron. Say what you will about his past performance -- for him to get across the finish line still would represent a remarkable accomplishment.

Nate Silver is an author for Baseball Prospectus and the acclaimed political blog FiveThirtyEight.com. This is his first piece for ESPN Insider.

[SlimKibbles]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

Its what I think, Bonds was a freak and is unmatched

and PECOTA analysis and projections

Interesting. Always liked Baseball Prospectus so their thoughts were a good read. Still, I guess if A-Rod really wants to catch Bonds, he won't have the luxury, like Bonds did, of becoming a "freak" while going untested for illegal steroids now will he?

(Sorry I went there but the whole "freak of nature" and being "unmatched" BS while ignoring what he did to get that way is irresponsible)

[CMH]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

What a bizarre thing to say. I see you're in the camp of, "'Roid up and entertain me." Okay, that's fine. So are baseball players just entertainers to you, like wrestlers, or are they athletes?

He's definitely not saying that.

All he's saying is that he wasn't supposed to know that Alex took steroids, and he has chosen to accept that without reporters, without snoops in the industry, all of us would have gone on with our lives believing(1) that Alex Rodriguez was a clean baseball player.

Obviously, the difference here is that we now know that Alex used steroids. Poopy knows that too. His comment is referring to the "what if we did not?"

(1) Despite many fans hoping that Alex Rodriguez would save baseball by topping Barry Bonds - a known, but never knowingly admitted or charged steroid user - there were a number of fans that had their doubts that Rodriguez was clean.

[econoodle]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

Sterioid blah blah blah
the whole league was practically taking ihm so its hard to digest what all the stats would have been without steroids.

that being said, A-rod only used it for 2 years or so?
i think
he still would have hit 30 hrs a year without em.

anyways, my number?
823.
no, wait, 832

[brett the jet favre]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

not as many as Griffy would have it wasnt always hurt. If we wasnt always hurt he would have atleased the record

[SlimKibbles]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

He's definitely not saying that.

All he's saying is that he wasn't supposed to know that Alex took steroids, and he has chosen to accept that without reporters, without snoops in the industry, all of us would have gone on with our lives believing(1) that Alex Rodriguez was a clean baseball player.

Obviously, the difference here is that we now know that Alex used steroids. Poopy knows that too. His comment is referring to the "what if we did not?"

(1) Despite many fans hoping that Alex Rodriguez would save baseball by topping Barry Bonds - a known, but never knowingly admitted or charged steroid user - there were a number of fans that had their doubts that Rodriguez was clean.

Gotcha. I see what you're saying.

[econoodle]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

not as many as Griffy would have it wasnt always hurt. If we wasnt always hurt he would have atleased the record

griffey would have hit close to 800

[brett the jet favre]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

Griffy has such a pretty swing best swing in baseball ever and he is a beast. i just hope the mariners get him a ring this year before he retires

[Buckeyes_Doc]

Re: How many Homers do you think A-rod will end his career with?

Griffy has such a pretty swing best swing in baseball ever and he is a beast. i just hope the mariners get him a ring this year before he retires

I agree. Griffey is my favorite player in baseball and my favorite sport athlete. Hope he gets a ring before he retires, and it sucks he had all those injuries. But at least he can say he played the game clean. (I sure hope so, I have faith he did/is.)