17 February 2012

Great Seasons and Aging





Joe Posnanski wrote this piece about player aging last week.  With Vlad signing on last year and the possibility that Manny might find a home in Baltimore, I figure something similar might be useful here with the understanding that Baltimore needs big time help to be considered a playoff contender.

Posnanski's article made me think about two things: (1) how about truly great seasons, one that are above 9 rWAR and (2) how do pitchers and batters relate to each other?



The graph above is interesting to me because it suggests that there are far more great seasons for batters (155) than pitchers (58).  Second, great seasons for batters basically occur between 23 and 32, which makes one wonder about Albert Pujols' 10 year contract.  The population for pitchers is much smaller than the hitters and that may make for the peculiar distribution above with age 27 and age 33 seasons making for a saddle type of peak.

If you hold the batters at 9 rWAR and drop the pitchers to an 8 rWAR (increasing the pitchers to 132), you get the following graph:


There is no longer as much of a saddle peak and both population appear to be distributed in a similar fashion.

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