THT: Gassko: Testing my career projection system

Gassko’s latest toy…

Those numbers are still significantly higher than what Bill James’ Favorite Toy projects. So maybe we should run one more test: What if my system strongly over-projects young hitters with high odds of making it to 3,000 hits, like Young and Zimmerman?

Well then, let’s run the same test as above but restrict ourselves to only the players at each age who were in the top 10 in projected odds of gathering 3,000 hits. Among 20-year-olds, my system thought that 4.7 of the top 10 players would reach 3,000 hits; only two did. At age 21, the prediction was 3.7, and the actual number was three. At 22, 3.5 and four; at 23, 3.5 and four again.

In total, there was only a very slight over-prediction, and that was probably due just to random chance.

In other words, there is little evidence that our system highly overrates young hitters, and good reason to believe that one of Young or Zimmerman will eventually reach 3,000 hits.