Tybalt from TyBlog
http://ty4.blogspot.com/2006/04/weve-seen-superteam-now-meet-superman.html
Albert Pujols hit three home runs today and singlehandedly won the game for the Cardinals. Ho, hum. It’s time to start asking ourselves if he can be the greatest baseball player in history, because he’s getting there without a lot of fanfare.
I thought I would look at how Albert fares on Bill James’s “Favorite Toy”, which is a rough way to figure out a player’s chances at achieving certain milestones. Instead of trying to make minute adjustments based on his jaw-dropping 2006 performance to date, I just used the figures as they read at the end of 2005. I am assuming that Albert’s reported age is his real age, since I’ve never seen one iota of evidence to assume otherwise. Every year that he continues to improve, he makes the age skeptics look dumber and dumber, doesn’t he?
The Favorite Toy uses an “established level” of each stat to make its calculations. That number is basically the number of hits, doubles, stolen bases etc. that a player has shown he should compile each season. I showed Albert’s established levels for each stat. Each milestone is followed by Albert’s estimated chance of reaching it. I noted the MLB record for each… the method estimates Albert has a viable chance of breaking the hits, doubles, home runs, runs scored and RBI records. Wow.