This will resolve to whoever wins the MLB home run title for 2024. i.e. the player who hits the most home runs that regular season.
In case of ties I will resolve the way MLB does (probably some combination of games played / ABs etc to find out who has a higher "rate")
If you would like me to add someone, please add a comment and I will add it if it's at all reasonable. We do pay a cost for having a huge number of choices, so I hope not to have to add people who have nearly no chance to win.
1,000
3.00Ye olde season average model has Ohtani at 14%, and I expect we'll use rate stats for the tie break. This update with seven games left and judge at +2.
Ran some quick simulations. Background: Both the Yankees and the Dodgers have 8 games left. Ohtani has gotten about 4.60 PA/game this year and last year, to Judge's 4.46. Ohtani has hit HRs on 7.4% of PAs this year; Judge, 7.9% this year, 8.1% the year before. If we take the modal # of ABs it's 36 for Judge, 37 for Ohtani. Drop in the season averages for HR% and Judge's 1-HR lead, it's 61% Judge, 24% Ohtani, 16% tie (screw rounding).
There's some reasons to think Ohtani might outperform that, though. I'll consider 3 factors: opposition pitching, park factor, and AB/game.
Park factor: Ohtani has 3 games at Coors (+14%) and 5 at Dodgers Stadium (+10%). Judge has 2 at Chase (-11%) and 6 at Yankee stadium (+10%). Both players have played half their games so far at home (+10%) and half at league average (+0%) so I'll simplify and pretend they've both played at +0% the whole season so far. I'll simplify and average the park factors, rather than fully simulate: This gives +11.5% for Ohtani and +4.75% for Judge.
Strength of opposition: Hard to disentangle this from park factor, so I'll just bluntly group teams into good/bad/ok. The Dodgers have 5 games against the Rockies (bad) and 3 against the Padres (good). The Yankees have 2 games against the Athletics (bad), 3 against the Orioles (good), and 3 against the Pirates (ok). Eyeballing related statistics like 100mph+ hits against, I think bad teams give up 10% more home runs and good teams give up 10% less. So, this is a +2.5% for Ohtani and a -1.25% for Judge - not as big as I expected! The Pirates could also be Bad and then Judge and Ohtani would both be +2.5%.
The spooky thing from this analysis: about 16% of the time, no matter the parameters, they tie. So I really care who wins by the MLB tiebreaker mentioned in the question.
AB/Game: As a proxy, I looked at total at bats against, on the MLB page:
- Rockies 5992 (Ohtani 5x)
- Padres 5732 (Ohtani 3x)
- Athletics 5845 (Judge 2x)
- Orioles 5773 (Judge 3x)
- Pirates 5866 (Judge 3x)
Trust me I have a spreadsheet: About 1% more for Ohtani's opponents than Judge's. Hard to justify much adjustment here. There is the fact that Ohtani is now leadoff, when he wasn't before the ASB - so our numbers might not capture it. Batting 1st rather than 3rd gives you about 0.3 AB/game. I'll try giving Ohtani an AB for this.
So, some possible beliefs:
- Ohtani's HR rate goes from 0.074 to 0.085 due to park & opposition (+15%)
- Judge's HR rate from 0.079 to 0.081 due to the same (+2%)
- Ohtani gets 1 extra AB due to leadoff/weak opposition. If we plug all these in...
Judge still wins 54%, Ohtani 30%, and draw 16%. How big an edge do we have to give Ohtani before he's actually favored, assuming +2 at bats? If we subjectively say Judge is slumping down to 0.075 HR rate and Ohtani has the Rockies totally figured out, up to 0.1 HR rate, he's favored at about 42%-41%. Similarly, if we just arbitrarily say Ohtani's going to have 53 at bats to Judge's 36, and they hit at their season average HR%, Ohtani edges it out 42%-41%.
Biggest uncertainty: if someone convinced me the Rockies pitchers have a HR problem, beyond just their general badness and the fact that they play at Coors, or if we looked at likely starters and found the same, 10+% HR numbers for Ohtani start to sound plausible and that would tip him over.
@JTBooth My other big question coming out of this: No matter how I slice it, they tie 16% of the time. MLB doesn't publish (that I could find) an official tiebreaker for the home run leader. If you just look at their order on the "Hitting stats leaders" thing that pops up when you Google search, it appears to be sorted by either games or at bats, not by home run rate - Ozuna is sorted above Rooker with 38 home runs. Ohtani has more games and at-bats than Judge by a lot - if this is the tiebreaker we're using, it adds a solid 16% to Ohtani's value. I'd really like to know what we're doing here, @Ernie
@JTBooth ah, good question. Here are the options I see:
1 .figure out a tiebreak system on our own or identify an existing one, take a poll of bettors, and settle on as what we do (soon)
2. state that if they tie, we will split the payout (based on poll)
In the original description it seems like I was admitting that in a superficial tie, we would expect to find a resolution criteria (most clearly, home run rate per AB or similar - but I will definitely admit that this gets VERY complex to do fairly / logically, since intentional walks and lots of other issues can impact "actual chance to HR" as well as the known huge distortions of stats due to team behavior, team needs (i.e. if you're up 20-0 the hitter may hit fewer HRs or the opposition may just let him hit a HR because its irrelevant - it's indefensible statistically to count these equally, but traditionally that's exactly what baseball does)
What would you guys like to do? My preferences, just putting these here to give you options:
1. 1st tier HR count, if tied, whoever has the higher HR per actual AB (minus intentional walks) number
2. if any kind of consensus emerges or you make an unopposed proposal that is fair, I'd love to settle on that.
@Ernie the rate isn't super close - Judge has 16 less at bats and another 16 more IBBs. And I really don't think we should be picking through games looking for contested home runs 😂. I think the two reasonable resolutions are rate (as you suggested in the post) or a 50/50 resolution (because there isn't actually an official MLB method. If you clarified it's rate I'd probably buy judge to 70%, if it's 50/50 I think the odds are right.