Even before Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s MLB career home-run record, people were looking forward to the day when someone less controversial would take the crown. Far and away the most likely candidate among active players is Alex Rodriguez.

Rodriguez went into Tuesday’s action with 503 home runs. This is his 14th season in the majors, and he’s playing just as well in 2007 as he did in his breakthrough 1996 campaign. A-Rod has stayed healthy, and shows no signs of slowing down at age 32.

Bonds is still hitting home runs, but if you plug A-Rod’s numbers into the Bill James “Career Assessments” tool, you’ll come up with a 30 percent chance for Rodriguez to reach the 800-homer plateau. At least, that’s what I came up with – the tool’s instructions are a bit fuzzy. But more important than some record, it projects six more years of A-Rod goodness. Enjoy.

Television, the drug of the nation, is all over the futures market now that the fall season is upon us: Kid Nation, Survivor 16, Survivor 17, Dancing with the Stars 5, and The Biggest Loser 4 are all on the betting menu.

Some of these bets have a greater degree of difficulty than others. For example, the Kid Nation offering asks if the show will be cancelled before it airs its final episode. “No” was the favorite at –600. To get an edge on these kind of bets, you can dig into the gossip rags to see what kind of ratings are being generated and what the TV bigwigs are saying.

Bets asking who will actually win the show are tougher to crack. These are all subjective contests; even The Biggest Loser is up to the voting preferences of the contestants more than the scale. Maybe Bill James can come up with a statistic for that.