Peak Age by Year of Birth (February 11, 2004)
Graphs are always fun...
--posted by TangoTiger at 11:23 PM EDT
Posted 1:00 a.m.,
February 12, 2004
(#1) -
studes
(homepage)
Alright! Great graph, tells a story, love it.
Seems pretty clear that the average peak age has been increasing over the past fifteen years. I wonder how he weighted the players? By plate appearances, or maybe not at all? Was there a minimum career length?
Great job, bob.
Posted 4:26 p.m.,
February 12, 2004
(#2) -
bob mong
(homepage)
Thanks for the link, Tango. Didn't weight squat, no minimum career length, no nothing. Total data dump, in graphical form :)
Pretty crude.
Ideas on better ways to do this? What would be a good minimum career length?
Also, it is interesting that the age has been increasing over the past 15 years...but also interesting that it has been increasing to the same, or only a slightly higher, level than that of players born between ~1908 and ~1920. So my question is: why the dip for players born between 1924 and 1948? Various wars? Something else?
Posted 4:38 p.m.,
February 12, 2004
(#3) -
tangotiger
You might want to try 3 separate lines:
players with 5 years or less,
players with 6 to 10 years,
players with 11 years or more
Posted 4:38 p.m.,
February 12, 2004
(#4) -
tangotiger
You will have selective sampling issues of course.
Posted 6:35 p.m.,
February 12, 2004
(#5) -
OCF
This could be of some interest to Hall of Merit voters.
If I understand Bob correctly, he used a basic offensive estimator (XR) without correcting it for league offensive context. Not correcting for league context shouldn't matter much over the long run, but it can matter quite a bit over the short run, since the context has on a number of occasions changed quite rapidly.
A downward "V" in the graph can be taken as pointing toward a year or two in which it was very likely for players to reach their peaks.
The very sharp downward spike at 1868 seems to point toward 1890 - the Player's League year, when there were three leagues and 24 teams. Two factors would influence the climb out of that: the contraction to 12 teams by 1892 would have truncated the careers of many young players, but those who survived would have then had their face-value offensive peaks in the big offensive years after 1893, when they weren't so young any more.
The AL expansion of 1901 doesn't leave a clear mark on the record because it was balanced against the effects of the decline of offense between the 1890's and the 1900's.
The "V" that bottoms out around 1889 may point toward the lively-ball bubble years of 1911-1912. For that particular time period it might be worth seing how different a context-adjusted version of this graph would be.