Age in MLB

15 Vote

by Floridagator904

With ESPN showing a lot of San Francisco Giants games lately, it got me thinking about experienced players and how it related to the teams success. Obviously the Giants have one of the most experienced rosters in Major League Baseball. To name a couple current Giants and a few of their impressive accolades: Barry Bonds – 7-time NL MVP, tied for most HR in career (755), single season HR record (73), only member of 500 HR/500 SB club; Omar Vizquel – 11 Gold Glove Awards, 2,500 + games played. There is no doubt these players will become members of the Hall of Fame (assuming neither get caught cheating).

Those aren’t the only experienced players the Giants boast, five of their eight position players (not counting pitchers) have over 1,000 games played in their career. This seems to be an odd lineup, considering most ball clubs are shifting to a new mindset of developing talent earlier and trying to avoid older players (there are a few exceptions, i.e. Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Julio Franco, etc.). Many of these players are normally limited to DH or are used as situational pinch hitters. While the Giants lineup interested me, I decided to do some research and find the average age of every lineup in the MLB. CBS Sportsline’s “Most Frequent Lineups” were used to determine which players from each team to utilize for the study. I did make a few exceptions to the most frequent lineups. For example, if a player was listed on the most frequent lineup yet had less AB than a player at the same position on that team, I would use the player with more AB. Some players used in certain lineups were not current (i.e. got traded recently therefore were still on the most frequent lineup). I still used them in the original team’s lineup because I wanted to compare the average age of the team to their winning percentage. That would only be fair because they contributed most to that team’s success. Also, American League lineups consisted of 9 players and National League lineups consisted of 8 players. Pitchers were ignored in my research. Categories of team’s average age are as follows: young (below 29), middle-age (29-31), old (31 and above).

I would assume a lineup with old age would have greater success than young and middle-age lineups because they theoretically have more experience. Note: Average winning percentage of old teams is (.491). But in the Giants case, not so much. So are the Giants the lone team with this characteristic?

After my calculations I found that there are 7 old teams, 10 middle-age teams, and 13 young teams in the MLB. That seems about right considering many teams have a large core of young players rather than older players. So to answer my previous question: No, but they do have the lowest winning percentage (.431) of the four old lineups in the major leagues with this attribute. The other three teams are the Chicago White Sox (.468), Houston Astros (.432), and the Texas Rangers (.432). The strange thing about that is the other four old teams (Detroit Tigers, .555; New York Mets, .568; New York Yankees, .554) have a significantly higher winning percentage than the average winning percentage of the young (.494) and middle-age (.513) lineups. So basically if you have an old team then you either suck or are really good. Why is that?........I’ll leave that for you to figure out.

Interesting facts obtained from my research: The Tampa Bay Devil Rays have the youngest team in the majors (average of 25.444) and the lowest winning percentage in the majors (.382). Arizona Diamondbacks and Milwaukee Brewers were the only teams with an average age less than 27 that have a winning record. Consequently, these clubs are widely regarded as this year’s biggest surprises. The Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Devil Rays are the only teams with no player over 30 in their most common lineups. The San Francisco Giants have no player younger than 32 years old in their most common lineup. The average age of their lineup is 35.875 which is 6.42 above the league average. The Detroit Tigers have only one player under the age of 30 (Granderson, 26) in their most common lineup. Youngest division was the NL East. Oldest division was AL West. The NL West has only one team with a losing record.

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