[Economist Ray Fair] asked… Which players have exhibited the most unusual age-performance profiles? Specifically, are there any players who got better with age?
Over the
entire period between 1921-’04, Fair found only 18 hitters who appear
to have defied Mother Nature, logging four or more seasons after the
age of 28 in which their OPS (on-base plus slugging average) exceeded
their age-specific expected level by more than one standard error.
And you know what? Except for good ol’ Charlie Gehringer (1939), they all come 1987 or later. Goodness gracious! Who would have thought? Check here for the list and further discussion, and thanks to John de Palma for the pointer.
Obviously one should look at steroids as a cause of the performance. But other medical advances, such as in training, diet, exercise, surgery, and so on would mean that players of more recent vintage would have a better chance of good performance as they got older, just as we’ve seen lots of older non-athletes continue to perform in other fields.
Which economists have exhibited the most unusual age-performance profiles?
Kyle S is right,
There was such a jump in offensive levels between 1992-94 preceeded and followed by the usual small amounts of year to year variation around these different levels that PED’s are not a very good explanation unless all PED users started using them at once. If you look at the list, there are only a couple of players that did not have some “bar setting” seasons before the jump, and have their exceeding expectations seasons after the jump. Given that this was the single largest jump in run scoring environment in baseball history, these are exactly the players you would expect to have the largest increase in unadjusted performance.
As for the other players on the list, Bob Boone at age 40 had a fairly lucky season where he his .310 on balls in play without his peripheral numbers changing at all. The next year he went back to being craptacular, and the next he was out of baseball. This season probably only makes the list because not many players are usually around to have flukey seasons at age 40, and most players drop significantly each season in their late thirties while Boone was able to eek out a season slightly better than before.
The other two non-Gehringer entries are both from 1987, a year where both leagues experienced a large jump in run scoring out of line with anything between WW2 and 1994(I wonder if it wasn’t a test run). Again, you’d expect the largest “oveperformance” in a year like that.
I believe if some kind of park and era adjustments were made, Bonds and Sosa’s seasons would still probably rank as out of line, but I would like to know exactly how much of this list is exactly what we should have expected.
This may be indicative of steroid use, but we should at least consider the alternative explanation that older players are willing to take up an extremely rigorous training regimen just to stay in the game because the financial incentives nowadays are enormous. And perhaps in a few cases this newfound seriousness and sense of purpose can lead not just to maintaining skills but actually improving them.
Baseball salaries have gone up far, far faster than inflation. Tens of millions of dollars are at stake if a top player can remain employed for even a year or two longer.
In 1965, the minimum salary for a baseball player was a mere $6000. In 1969, Curt Flood was offered a mere $5000 salary increase and held out for more. Free agency was not introduced until 1975. [link] Or see another link for a history of average player salaries.
In 1987, the top annual salary was $2 million. The 2007 top salary is $23 million.
I can’t believe Charlie Gehringer used steroids. I’m totally devastated.
It’s somewhat interesting to note that some of the players at the bottom of the list did not play in “full seasons” in their biggest outlier years. For example, Molitor played in only 118 games in 1987 (in most of these seasons under study a “full season” is either 154 games or 162). Molitor was also oft-injured early in his career so his established early career levels are likely not indicative of his actual ability, especially once they took him off the field and made him a full time designated hitter. Gehringer in only 118 in 1939, Surhoff only 117 in 1995, Chili Davis played in 108 in 1994, and Julio Frano played in 125 (but only 360 or so plate appearances) in 2004 (plus the fact that I can’t believe one could credibly establish any level of play for a 45 year old player). It’s possible, at least for these particular seasons, that the players just didn’t have time to return to their historical norms. It’s like they were riding a hot streak and then were hurt before turning cold.
That basically leaves the Coors field effect guys (Larry Walker and Andres Galarraga) and the top couple of guys on the list (Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Luis Gonzalez who no one ever mentions, and Ken Caminiti who admitted using steroids during 1996). Even Bonds’ biggest outlier year is a semi-”fluke” because he had 120 plate appearances where he had no control (at least during those at-bats – he had control over what happened in previous years) over what happened (he was intentionally walked 120 times), which in a way will “artificially” drive up a player’s OPS. As for Gary Gaetti, Bill James (I think it is in the New Baseball Historical Abstract – the book where he ranks the top 100 players at each position by his Win Shares method) noted that he had a remarkably slow decline over the course of his career, way slower than just about anyone who had his initial skill set.
I would also throw in the fact that there has been an acceptance of the usefulness of walks as part of player’s offensive repetoire, thus possibly leading to player’s who walk a lot staying in the game longer, especially if they have power or some other skill. Rickey Henderson, by the “traditional” metric of batting average, may have been finished in the mid-late 1990s because he was batting about .240. But his OBP was up around .400, and even around .370 in his last few years, and he could still run, and managers saw value in that. Also in that Bill James book, on the Roy Cullenbine entry, there was a story about Cullenbine being the laziest SOB on the planet because all he did was wait around for a walk. He had the 3rd highest OBP in the AL that year and the 2nd most walks (behind Ted Williams) and even received 3 points in MVP voting despite batting just .224, yet he played no more after that year (he was only 33). The fact that it is recognized that these players with high walk totals are helping the club (call it the Moneyball effect if you want even though it happened before Moneyball) may lead to some of them staying in the game longer and having “abnormal” seasons after their 27th or 28th birthday. I really don’t understand how Albert Belle is on the list with his biggest outlier year at age 28 given that 28 is supposed to be a hitter’s peak year. Maybe I’m missing something.
And I’d really like to see Hank Aaron’s numbers in this study – his two highest OPS numbers were 1.079 and 1.045, which happened in 1971 and 1973, when he was 37 and 39 years old. He also had his career high in homeruns at age 37. Most of this information you can find from the stats on http://www.baseball-reference.com Actually, in 4 of his 5 years from age 35-39 he has an OPS over .950, and in the other year it is over .900. I can’t possibly see how he didn’t make this list, even given his established level of play early in his career.
Interesting that age 27 or 28 seems to be players’ peak. I think this accords well with some of Bill James’ work. What does that say about free agent contracts, which get pretty big around that time? What does it say about the frenzy over getting Johann Santana – age 27 – in trade for good young prospects?
Babe Ruth’s *OPS+ was slightly higher from age 35-38 than it was from age 27-30. The reason was that after Ruth’s disastrous 1925 season at age 30 caused by his Britney Spears’-level hedonism, he hired a personal trainer and, to the surprise of everybody, worked out impressively during the off-season for the next decade.
Honus Wagner’s four highest *OPS+ seasons were from 32-35 (1906-1909). Wagner was one of the very few players of his day to stay in shape by lifting weights.
The moral is that it can be difficult to tell the difference between a player who works out and a player who works out and uses steroids. Since economist Ray Fair is doing a statistical analysis that threatens to impugn the reputations of individuals by implying they are cheating, he owes it to the players and to the world to use the best analytical tools available, even if that requires him to study the work of non-economists.
Why economists so often pronounce such complete emotional nonsense?
Immigration, IQ and race, now baseball – and that just on this blog.
There is got to be a systemic error.
Perhaps economics adequately describes much smaller domain than economists think.
I’ll agree about the arrogance of economists. But when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs in sports, the numbers, or for that matter the look of the bodies, make it pretty clear Park effects, or whatever, don’t make it go away. I think some of you are confusing good debating points with an effective response on the substance.
last post, I promise. Larry Walker at career at Coors field
Avg obp slg
.381 .462 .710
and carreer on the road
.278 .370 .495
The year in question:
.461 .531 .879 at Coors
.286 .375 .519 on the road
Good gracious, that even shocked me.
(Also Todd Helton career .367 .465 .663 at Coors, .295 .394 .502 on the road)
I think we can stop using Walker as a data point.
Luis Gonzalez, 2001 hit the hell out of the ball on the road and home, but the weird thing is, his performance in 2002 is essentially the same as it was in 2000. It was really just one fluke year. Maybe steroid-enabled, but why just the one year?
Tyler, it’s not “debating points.”
For example, I’ve been complaining that steroids impact sports statistics since the 1990s. And I did exactly the same type of age-profile analysis several years ago on by blog and came to the same conclusion: that Barry Bonds had started juicing. But at least I had enough respect for the accomplishments of sabremetricians to use a statistic they had invented to overcome league and park effects.
The effects of drug cheating are so massive that you can see them even using the wrong statistics, but to accuse individual players of cheating based on using the wrong statistics because you are too arrogant and lazy to learn what noneconomists know about what tools you should use for the job is disgraceful.
Unfortunately, it’s symptomatic of the whole freakonomics fad, going back to its seminal publicity coup in 1999 when the newspapers breathlessly reported that Steven Levitt had showed that legalizing abortion in 1970-1973 had cut the crime rate in 1997 versus 1985, which were the two data points he looked at. He had taken his theory around to seminars at prestigious economics departments, and apparently nobody knew enough about criminology to point out that the homicide rate among 14-17 year olds had tripled between 1985 and 1993 (i.e., between the last cohort born before legalization and the first cohort born afterwards).
The moral of the story is that economists can’t keep parachuting into other fields and expect to do good work without making an major effort to learn what the experts in the field already know.
Steroids (which are a form of synthetic sex hormones) are an interesting and important topic because they shed much light on the differences between the sexes, and thus on feminist controversies such as whether should women be allowed in combat units of the military.
For an analysis of how steroids affected the gender gap in Olympic running, and the implications for the women-in-combat controversy, see my 1997 National Review article “Track and Battlefield:”
http://www.isteve.com/gendrgap.htm
With all the advances in the medical fiels, surgery, dieting, there were several baseball player cases that were caught using legal steroids. So where is fair play? Long forgotten…
I guess the performance of a baseball player and not only it is set by his phisical condition.I know that there are many players who use drugs such as steroids or others and I wonder where is the fair play.anabolic steroids
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