How Might Bonds and Clemens Have Done Without PEDs?

See Not as great: Assessing Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens without the PED factor by Mark Fainaru-Wada & T.J. Quinn of ESPN.

 

Excerpt:

 

"Meet baseball stats guru Dan Szymborski, the creator of the ZiPS projection system. In the simplest terms, the system (endorsed by MLB.com and explained here) uses past performance and trends on how performance degrades with age to predict a player's future performance. ESPN asked him to project Bonds' and Clemens' career stats from the season each is believed to have started using PEDs -- 1999 for Bonds and 1998 for Clemens."

 

Bonds' trajectory had him with a career WAR of 128.7 (instead of his actual WAR of 164.4). He would drop from 2nd highest career WAR for position players at FanGraphs to 9th. That still sounds like a first ballot Hall of Famer.

 

Clemens' trajectory had him with a career WAR of 111.3 (instead of his actual WAR of 133.7). He would drop from first in career WAR for pitchers at FanGraphs to 4th. That still sounds like a first ballot Hall of Famer, too.

 

Here is another excerpt:

 

"Szymborski is the first to admit that his projection system is not an exact science -- maybe something akin to predicting the weather -- and that the drugs can't account entirely for the sizable differences between the projections and the players' real, larger-than-life numbers. Yes, modern-day players are in far better shape than their predecessors, working out harder and more consistently (though PEDs actually are part of that equation in some cases). Players' careers are lasting longer, as they recover faster from injuries and benefit from a more scientific approach to the game. And, of course, Bonds and Clemens faced an untold number of opponents who used PEDs, too.

With those caveats, however, the ZiPS system has proved startlingly accurate. To demonstrate, Szymborski took 139 players who had at least 502 plate appearances in 2015, then compared their real numbers in five categories over the next six seasons to what the projection model spit out. The accuracy of the results surprised even Szymborski. For example, when comparing their real-life home run totals with projected homers (he normalized by using actual plate appearances, thus accounting for injuries, anomalies, etc.), the "average" miss was about two per season. The average miss on batting average was 13 points, and on OPS it was 36 points."