There will be lots of talk about A-rod's 500th homer. I thought I'd look at some slightly different data.

For 5 members of the 500 HR club, I looked at their PI event log for homers to find their 100th, 200th, 300th, 400th, and 500th homers, then I looked at their PI career game log to find out which career game number those homers were hit in.

Here are the results, represented graphically:

For the comparison, I picked Bonds because he's interesting from an all-time HR record point of view. I picked Frank Thomas because he is the most recent player before A-rod to get to his 500th homer. And I picked Mike Schmidt, pretty much at random, as a somewhat older member of the club. Remember that detailed data is not available before 1957, so we cannot easily look at, for example, Babe Ruth (although the data is certainly available from other sources.)

There are all kinds of interesting things to note:

• You can really see how much faster A-rod is getting there than everybody else. He got to 100 HR in just about the same about of time as Schmidt and Thomas, but then went considerably faster, getting to 500 HR much faster than any of these other guys. In fact, comparing A-rod to Bonds, Schmidt, and Thomas, he got to 500 homers on average 293 games faster than those guys.
• If you look at the lines for A-rod, Schmidt, and Bonds (ignoring Thomas' yellow line), you notice that the slope of the lines is essentially identical. This means that these guys hit their homers at the same rate, more or less. You see that Schmidt slowed down between 400 and 500 (his line slopes upwards there, meaning more games in between) while Bonds sped up between 400 and 500 (his line slopes downwards there.) A-rod, meanwhile, has been Steady Eddie, with the slope of his line virtually constant for his whole career so far.
• The acceleration in Bonds career is really apparent here. He wasn't a huge power hitter when he first came up, and you can see that he got to 100 HR much slower than any of these other guys. (It took Bonds 640 games, whereas it took A-rod 470, Schmidt 472, and Thomas 506.) But you can see that by the time he got to 500, he caught up with the pack (except for A-rod, who as we already said is way faster.) Who knows how Bonds has managed to hit so many more homers later in his career? (I bet I know what you're thinking....)

Now, here's the same graph, adding in a couple of bits.

We've extended Bonds' line to 700, again using the actual game numbers in which he achieved 600 and 700 HR. We've also extended A-rod's line artificially, using the average slope of his own line. First, you can see that Bonds got from 500 to 600 faster than any other jump of 100 in his career (just 240 games for 100 HR!!!). His pace from 600 to 700 was a bit slower, but still about equal to A-rod's career pace so far.

If A-rod stays on his pace, he'll get to 700 HR at game 2547 and 755 HR at game 2738. If he plays all of his team's games from here on out and keeps that pace, he'll hit his 700th late in the 2011 season, and his 755th early in 2013. Seems like a long time away...let's check back in 2010 or so.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Event Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.