Senior Project Day 9

Finished up with the 5 All-Time Great players I used as a sample for the other players, and I have to say that the process has been quite surprising. Everyone peaks and declines differently in different ways. Of course, when I started this project, I didn't expect to find a exact numbers for these players, since there's no real way for us to really know what the final stat line would have or could have been. Yet, the more and more I calculate, the less and less I want to settle for a range, but instead find an exact number. I know that's impossible, but it's been on my mind these past few days. After I finished up the calculations by hand, I hit a dead end. The percent decline and standard deviations didn't match smoothly across the 5 players. Some statistics had some very close drops in decline, for example, for Home Runs, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, and Mickey Mantle experienced drops of 48%, 50%, and 50%, where as On Base Percentage decline for Mantle, Musial, Hank Aaron, and Ted Williams were 13%, 12%, 14%, and 16%.

What I'm thinking of doing is averaging out the percentages and finding their own standard deviation in order to set up a a range of percentage declines I can use for the steroid users. At least then, I can see where my calculations land in comparison to their actual values. Microsoft Excel has been an enormous amount of help to me. Once I hit that dead end earlier today, I decided to see if Excel could identify anything I had missed. It did not disappoint. I took the home run averages of Mantle, Musial, Mays, Aaron, and Williams and plotted them on a graph. Then, I found the standard deviation between their actual numbers and the average. I set up data points that made additional lines representing the sum of the average and standard deviation as well as the difference, giving me 3 lines in total. Finally, I decided to plot Barry Bonds' home run totals on the graph as well, to see what his numbers looked in comparison to the 5 legends:

As you can see, it was within the range of the averages, up until the years he supposedly started taking steroids. With this new found information, I'm hoping to use this same analysis for the other statistics as well, and compare them to the actual numbers of Bonds and Sosa.

On an interesting side note, while I was struggling to make a decision as to how to proceed, I decided to look on google for any tips or pointers as to forecasting or projecting a baseball players statistics. I stumbled upon a very interesting article on BaseballProspectus,  detailing the difficulties of forecasting a players stats and what good basic steps a novice like myself could take. Yet, there was something about this article that stuck out to me. More specifically, it was the author: