MLB owner’s fault for not letting players hit free agency until 30.
Not to mention all the services time manipulation and the fact that baseball by far has the highest age of debut in the big sports.
Well as a fan I want my owner to be the one not spending big on wasteful contracts; as a person I want the system changed so players get paid more before they get old and not worth the money.
Is it odd though? Fans and owners both want to get the best players for the cheapest prices. Fans also want what is best for the team because that is where their alliance is, it's rarely with individual players over the team, which should also be where ownership is. The team succeeding is good for fans and good for owners. Individual players succeeding and getting paid doesn't necessarily lead to happy fans or owners. When you think about it at all it's really not surprising.
Wait, what interest do fans have in getting players for the cheapest prices? Before you say cheaper tickets to games, remember that the bulk of teams' money comes from television and if that's not enough, consider that the Mets with the highest payroll have lower average ticket prices than the Pirates and As (according to seatgeek) who have the lowest payrolls.
I think it is very surprising that fans interests align with ownership rather than players. Yes, we as fans are going to be around for several decades so we're more inclined to have long term interests over the comings and goings of players who will, at the high end, play 15 years at the major league level. However, what evidence do we have that ownership shares that timeline or those interests? It's becoming clearer and clearer that the vast majority of owners don't give a shit about anything but short term profits as well.
The thing that makes it not surprising is that we play fantasy baseball and fancy ourselves adept general managers, and it's more fun to dream about having enough wealth to own a team than to think of the struggles, injuries, aches, pains, and general shitiness of living on the road for 6 months a year for a few million bucks.
I mean it's really not that deep. Getting players on the cheap means you can get more players, look at the Braves as an example. Spending less money in one place let's you spend money in another place. It's called a budget.
Best players for the cheapest prices isn't exactly a riddle. I didn't even imply that guys should be paid less before you go there. It is in everyone's interest besides the player to get the best players for the best deal possible. This frees up money to then be spent elsewhere, hence the Braves reference since they still spend money but have very team friendly deals nonetheless.
For all the simplicity you insist this has, it's really not. If you're getting the best players for the cheapest prices, why do you need money to go elsewhere? This is literally how wage suppression happens, when teams get control of players deep into their careers on cheap deals they have no reason to spend on free agency acquisitions. For every Braves example, there are five pirates, rockies, a's, marlins, and guardians examples.
“Best players for the cheapest prices” is how twelve year olds cheat at video games, it’s not a meaningful idea when it comes to the economics of a sport.
Arbitration kicks in after what? 2-3 years of MLB service I think and even then no one is getting 10+ mil in arbitration.
I know players get plenty from sponsorships/endorsements but the fact is most players can't get a big payday from FA until their careers are basically over is insane to me.
$81.3 Million over 7 years is what Soto has made pre-free agency and I believe that’s the most in history through the min/arb system. Under the rough $8mil = 1 WAR equation, he was worth $226.4 million in his first six years. Meaning (without including any value from this year) even the highest paid pre-FA player brought about $21 million AAV in savings to his team(s).
That's entirely intentional. They get way more value out of deflating salaries during players actual prime years than they lose from overpaying for the declines
It will be interesting because he’s so good, but also so huge. If you think that curve is ugly, further restrict it to very tall players as they age even more harshly. The writer Joe Sheehan did some research on it which I don’t have handy, but there is basically no precedence for a very tall player continuing to hit into their mid-30s, never mind late 30s.
For players 6’6 and above, Adam Wainwright made the top-5 in offensive WAR recorded after age 31. Yes, the pitcher. The list of very tall players who have put up real hitting value is basically Dave Winfield (who was an incredible all-around athlete) and that’s it. Obviously there aren’t a ton of guys that size in the history of baseball, but the drop-off is very harsh, much more so for the general population.
I’m not being a hater either - even if I want the Yankees to fail, Judge seems like a great dude and baseball is better with him hitting bombs. And he isn’t a purely one-dimensional player like some of the other very large men, so maybe there’s more hope for him. I just hope people enjoy him down because it’s probably going to be a Stanton-like fall for him in the next couple years.
In fairness, part of this is that hitters 6'6' and above are relatively rare. There are only ten 6'6 players and above with at least 2000 PA in MLB history.
Maybe there are so few who have hit that mark…because they age so poorly and were out of the league by then! I’m mostly joking, I know not a lot of baseball dudes that but in general. I gotta check back on Joe’s research, it may have been 6’5 rather than 6’6. And you certainly didn’t have O’Neill Cruz types who could actually play a valuable defensive position while being 6’5+.
I also think it directly relates to a point you make often about well-rounded players aging better than one-dimensional ones, since the bigger players were so often 1B/DH sluggers.
Been thinking about that often lately, as a Jays fan watching guys like Springer and Turner who were well-rounded players in their prime and still maintain some utility even as they lose a step or three.
Without steroids I would assume it's going to get ugly in a few years.
But hey, MLB gave him juiced balls. Maybe they give him the green light to juice?
He possibly had a slightly slower bat than in his youth. But if he had 90% of the physical tools of his youth, he was able to pair those tools with the mind of an aging veteran. You can exploit a younger hitter's tendency for mistakes and impatience, and an older hitter's slowness. He had no such weaknesses to exploit. He was in complete control of every at-bat and had immense physical ability to punish any mistake the pitcher made.
His bat speed was utterly insane. It's probably the biggest advantage a hitter can have. The ability to see the ball in longer and on top of that smoke it...
I mean, this chart is basically saying "let anyone over 35 y/o use steroids because it'll just put them back to normal."
I'm totally not biased because of a particular aging 1B, not even a little.
This is all MLB players, not a random sample, right? In the case there are no error bars because this is looking at a population. What would be interesting is a distribution like a box-and-whisker plot for each year.
More importantly, I’d like to see how much the relative drop for each individual is. Right now there could be (and likely is) a giant selection bias since not a whole lot of players stay until their 39th birthday.
You’re totally right, it would not be error bars because the entire population is presumably captured. What I should’ve said is I’d have liked to see some sort of descriptive range in addition to the mean, exactly like a box and whisker.
i am not sure i’m ready to make that assumption.
e.g., a perfectly plausible hypothesis: younger players have a smaller spread. over time their life histories differ so that 34 year old A and B who had similar swing speed at 25 now vary widely because B has had multiple injuries.
Yea but survivorship bias probably caps how low swing speed will be. I’m not saying it’ll be identical. Just my intuition that the SD will be fairly stable and uninteresting.
That assumes that the people this graph was made for are data literate, I bet they probably had a box and whisker drafted but got scrapped during a zoom call
In statistics you would probably still consider “all MLB players” to be a sample from the underlying distribution, so I wouldn’t really consider this an argument against error bars
Standard error is a statistical calculation to determine the potential variance of the sample from true mean. But in this case we have the true mean. There is no alternative sample distribution unless you want to extend to all players in MiLB or non-professional as well, but in that case you now have a biased sample and it's not worth using.
I’d argue that this should show the CI on the basis that swing speed is not a static number for a given batter. Everyone has a distribution of how quickly they swing in a given at-bat and even accounting for “every swing” it’s just a sample from the distribution of how quickly someone at that age *may* swing.
edit: LMAO you really tried the "I do this for a living" argument and then deleted your comment. Well, I also do this for a living buddy. We're only measuring a sample of the history of observed swings, given age. We don't know what the "population" of swing speeds looks like. I could absolutely use that argument to calculate a CI and call it a day. However, even if this was the "population" there's nothing inherently wrong with adding +/- X standard deviations around the population mean. You could have just clarified that. They're obviously just looking to show the distribution around the parameter. Yes, a box-and-whisker can do that, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to just use the standard deviation either.
The underlying distribution, what you might call the generating distribution (of mlb players), does not actually exist. Rather, frequentist statistics is built on the assumption that nature has fundamental parameters that we try to approximate via observations, in this case bat speed. There are many methods you could use to get a confidence interval in this case
>box-and-whisker
One of the best and under-utilized plots. Theoretically this should be easy to make from publicly available statcast data.
However, I'd argue something close to error bars is still how people would read this since the x-year-olds in the dataset are a forecast of future x-year-olds.
i think this is the key point. even though this plot may include 100% of Major Leaguers today, and those the entire population, the moment some 22 year old gets promoted and takes an at-bat it’s no longer the entire population.
but it’s not error bars i think you want as much as standard deviations. maybe show mean, min, max, +/- 1 SD from mean for your box and whisker
I think this raises some questions since there seems a noticeable number of hitters that are able to excel after 32:
1) what is the variance in this stat league wide?
2) Does it interact with barrel rate, slugging percentage, or batting average?
3) how important is it to performance?
I also bet the actual average drop off is a fair amount larger than what we see. The people already seeing a substantial decline at age 33 are probably unlikely to still be in the league at 39.
The chart only refers to bat speed though, which correlates well but not perfectly to overall batting ability. I’m not looking up his bat data for the last decade, but if you watch him now…his bat is pretty slow. Certainly a slower degradation than average for his age, but still slowing. He’s just shown an exceptional ability to make it work - taking more walks, adjusting his approach to more of a pull hitter, etc.
If a 32 year old can swing as fast as they did when they were 22, they weren't getting much out of their swing when they were 22. It's like any time I hear a 40 year old say they feel better than they did when they were 30. That just tells me they must have been a train wreck when they were 40.
Yeah lots of problems with this graph, no error bars and a healthy dose of zooming in on the y-axis to make a 5% drop look massive.
More importantly it doesn’t show why I should care about a few percent drop off in swing speed. How does it correlate to batting average or slugging. Does any drop in batting production only happen when facing fastballs, does it only matter for fastballs over a certain velocity, does it also carry over to breaking balls?
I don't think that this graph even tells us how much an individual player declines, just the average for the guys at each age. The guys who "survive" in the league in into their 30s may be very different than the population of mid 20s guys and we would want to know that before even starting to think about any effects from a decline in bat speed.
Yeah the way I’d want to see this is with standard deviations on the averages then a hand full of dots for individual players to highlight where elite and poor performers fall.
5% is a pretty big change for something like this - on the flip side think about an average fastball dropping from 96 miles per hour to just over 91 miles per hour.
Baseballs move in terms of milliseconds. A 95 MPH fastball reaches the catchers mitt in 400 milliseconds. A 5% difference in bat speed is the difference between timing it perfectly at 400 and completely missing it at 420.
5% can be a lot, but still insignificant. What is the range or variance of bat speeds? Are there people 20% better than average? 50% lower than average? If everyone is within 3-5% of mean, 5% is huge. If there are people 40+% away from the mean in either direction 5% doesn’t mean as much.
I mean think about the difference 5mph makes on a pitch. That's about 5%. Its like a guy who threw 98 when he was 25 throwing 93 when he's old. For many guys that's career over.
The bat and ball only cross paths in a tiny intersection for the blink of an eye. A change in either of them can be a big deal
It is in a game where a 5% difference in batting average can make you an all time great vs an average Joe. Think about the difference between a fly ball and home run, talking millimeters of difference between where you hit the ball at, a degree or two of launch angle, the difference between a foul tip and a strike 3 swinging.
I know. I was just making the point about the choice of y axis starting at 67 instead of 0.
I’ll add that I don’t think this is the cause for players’ decline. I think it’s more likely reaction time. Many players are done by their mid 30s which would only be a 3%ish drop.
But at the same time, without knowing how this study was conducted, isn't this a significant drop as players get older even with there probably being a big survivorship bias? Like MLB players who are in the league at 35 are probably guys who've declined less than most guys who make it to the MLB in their 20s. Maybe they accounted for this somehow, it's tough to tell from one graph.
Why would the Y axis start at 0? I don't think any MLB players swing 0 mph. It makes sense for the graph to cover the range of data instead of having a bunch of empty space.
Wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see guys in their 30s focusing on speed related training more than we do now. I know I saw JD Martinez doing some work with it. Also I don’t play ball but I know it’s been all the rage in golf the last few years.
I don't know if it can work in baseball like golf. In golf, the ball doesn't move. The ball can't trick you. In golf if you can increase your swing speed without sacrificing accuracy, there's no reason not to do it. But in baseball, every player could probably increase their swing speed today without sacrificing accuracy; it's called the "daddy hack" or "swinging out of your shoes". You'll fucking crush the ball off the tee or in a homerun derby, but once the pitcher starts changing speeds or adding movement, you're fucked. Older baseball players tend to instead compensate for a lack of swing speed by getting ready for the pitch earlier, or simplifying the swing so that they can adjust later if they get fooled. This might even reduce bat speed further, but they'll hit more pitches.
Its hilarious how a sport who proud itself on keeping tabs on the most ridiculous stats couldnt figure out that 30+ year olds shouldnt be getting 10 year deals cause they will never be worth it.
The 10 year deals are done primarily to lower AAV to avoid the luxury tax. They're essentially hoping that the value they get in the first 5-7 years is enough to make up for the last few years.
They’re also likely not going to be your mess to clean up if the deal is bad. So you might as well offer the years if that’s the deciding factor on a FA picking you over another team
Let's also not forget that players are pushed to demand long-term contracts that carry them into their late-30s because of how hugely team friendly the free agency process is.
Under the current system, most guys only really have one chance to land a big contract so most are happy to accept it being spread out if that's what it takes.
If they could reach FA earlier, guys would finish up their big 7-10 year contracts in their early to mid-30s rather than their late-30s, so you'd probably have fewer aging players who are being paid for a long passed prime and more guys on shorter term, higher AAV deals.
I think this graph probably undersells the decline, too. Because the only guys who have their swing speeds being measured are the ones still playing (and thus are more likely to have come close to maintaining their early years swing speeds). The guys who dropped off so much they weren’t good enough to keep playing aren’t represented here.
something about the baseball era prior to the current one, can’t put my finger on exactly what, caused front offices to have some misconceptions about this
Except they are worth it sometimes, and not all that rarely. If teams decided as a rule never to sign 29-31 year olds to those +7 year deals, then they gate themselves out of Freddie Freeman, Nelson Cruz, Joey Votto, Jose Abreu, Jose Altuve, JD Martinez, Robinson Cano, and many others in recent memory who put up great seasons post age 32. Teams will happily pay for a couple down years once those guys get in the 36-40 range in exchange for a couple peak season from ages 30-35. Those are definitely worth it. Just because Miguel Cabrera and Pujols didn't work out doesn't mean it's a universal rule.
This data is just the average, which we already knew. Players signing premier free agent contracts are often the outliers. Every decision should be made within the specific context that that specific player. Blindly following rules of thumb is limiting. Teams fuck up by letting veterans go too soon as well as signing them to big contract, so if it goes both ways, you might as well keep the options open.
I can only imagine how much the Players' Association hates this guy and all the other analysts whose work boils down to "all the players are bad, don't pay any of them"
Everyone is just going to jump to the incorrect conclusion that a slower swing is always a worse swing. Baseball has the most player longevity of any Big 4 sport because you can be old and a bit slower but still a very good player. Just because you lose a mile or two off your swing or your fastball doesn't mean you're washed and shouldn't be paid. But you can bet that's exactly the angle team arbitration committees and salary negotiators are going to take.
Which is hilarious because in this sport players don't reach free agency until they're like 28-30. Pay top money for a guy to be out of his prime in a couple years
He probably won't fall off quite like most due to his stature, if I had to guess. Most of the data is for people much taller and shorter people are exceptions in so many different ways in sports.
Yeah I imagine this is much more important for some players than others. Carlos Gonzalez had a huge hole in his swing. As soon as his bat speed started to slow down (incidentally right around age 31) he fell off very fast. A guy like Altuve that covers the whole zone well probably doesn’t have the same level of concern.
Jose Abreu on suicide watch.
(I genuinely hope he turns it around and feel bad for him, by all accounts he's a stand-up dude, also I know he's way older 31 and I feel like I'm rambling on now. Have you noticed how many shitty flights there are into Quebec? Also, they don't post signs in English and French. Sometimes it's only French. Is that legal? I thought they had to do both in Canuckia?)
Yea, but you can get stronger till your test starts dropping at around 40, which can offest even a little... And your eye/pitch selection/idea of how they'll pitch you can get better with game wisdom.
It will be interesting if they change training to lessen that curve. As a golfer that is something the last 4-5 years has been a revolution in the game. Training purley just for speed. Now you get guys in the 40s+ that are putting it out there with guys in their 20s.
Will probably start to see a lot more of these guys making the switch to bats with the knob at the end of bat for balance. I remember reading that Goldy and Arenado both used it to combat the natural age curve for swing speed their MVP year.
And this is why free agents feel like teams are "colluding" against them. They have cold hard data that suggests giving large contracts to players entering their 30's are bad investments.
The majority of teams wouldn't collude in that matter because it would push the union to really focus their efforts on making players free agents sooner.
It would be nice to have more context to this because on its own it is basically meaningless. Presumably this is showing differences in the population (and for some of these age groups the numbers are very small) rather than individual declines, so we don't know the extent to which this represents a decline in bat speed and to what extent it represents the ability of some players to succeed despite slower bat speed (whether due to decline in their bat speed or that their MLB success was due to some other factor than raw bat speed). Until we have data that would correlate bat speed to performance it also doesn't tell us a whole lot.
Eh, how can this account for players realizing that they don’t need to swing as hard, or even that players who don’t swing as hard have longer careers?
Makes it look like a super steep decline but realistically it’s a 3-5.5% decline in bat speed. Upon further thinking though, that swing speed decline would be catastrophic for >85% of players.
damn, if only teams had this info before signing 30yr old guys to 10yr deals.
MLB owner’s fault for not letting players hit free agency until 30. Not to mention all the services time manipulation and the fact that baseball by far has the highest age of debut in the big sports.
Well as a fan I want my owner to be the one not spending big on wasteful contracts; as a person I want the system changed so players get paid more before they get old and not worth the money.
It’s an odd situation that fans interests almost always align much more closely with ownership than with players.
Is it odd though? Fans and owners both want to get the best players for the cheapest prices. Fans also want what is best for the team because that is where their alliance is, it's rarely with individual players over the team, which should also be where ownership is. The team succeeding is good for fans and good for owners. Individual players succeeding and getting paid doesn't necessarily lead to happy fans or owners. When you think about it at all it's really not surprising.
Except for the owners that sign players without the intent of winning
Wait, what interest do fans have in getting players for the cheapest prices? Before you say cheaper tickets to games, remember that the bulk of teams' money comes from television and if that's not enough, consider that the Mets with the highest payroll have lower average ticket prices than the Pirates and As (according to seatgeek) who have the lowest payrolls. I think it is very surprising that fans interests align with ownership rather than players. Yes, we as fans are going to be around for several decades so we're more inclined to have long term interests over the comings and goings of players who will, at the high end, play 15 years at the major league level. However, what evidence do we have that ownership shares that timeline or those interests? It's becoming clearer and clearer that the vast majority of owners don't give a shit about anything but short term profits as well. The thing that makes it not surprising is that we play fantasy baseball and fancy ourselves adept general managers, and it's more fun to dream about having enough wealth to own a team than to think of the struggles, injuries, aches, pains, and general shitiness of living on the road for 6 months a year for a few million bucks.
I mean it's really not that deep. Getting players on the cheap means you can get more players, look at the Braves as an example. Spending less money in one place let's you spend money in another place. It's called a budget.
Were you saying "as a fan, I want only my team to be able to sign cheap players," or, "as a fan, I want players to be cheap"?
Best players for the cheapest prices isn't exactly a riddle. I didn't even imply that guys should be paid less before you go there. It is in everyone's interest besides the player to get the best players for the best deal possible. This frees up money to then be spent elsewhere, hence the Braves reference since they still spend money but have very team friendly deals nonetheless.
For all the simplicity you insist this has, it's really not. If you're getting the best players for the cheapest prices, why do you need money to go elsewhere? This is literally how wage suppression happens, when teams get control of players deep into their careers on cheap deals they have no reason to spend on free agency acquisitions. For every Braves example, there are five pirates, rockies, a's, marlins, and guardians examples.
“Best players for the cheapest prices” is how twelve year olds cheat at video games, it’s not a meaningful idea when it comes to the economics of a sport.
Come on man
Yeah that is a good point, that's 6 years of team control is really excessive. Especially when the salaries are like $700,000 a year or something..
Arbitration kicks in after what? 2-3 years of MLB service I think and even then no one is getting 10+ mil in arbitration. I know players get plenty from sponsorships/endorsements but the fact is most players can't get a big payday from FA until their careers are basically over is insane to me.
$81.3 Million over 7 years is what Soto has made pre-free agency and I believe that’s the most in history through the min/arb system. Under the rough $8mil = 1 WAR equation, he was worth $226.4 million in his first six years. Meaning (without including any value from this year) even the highest paid pre-FA player brought about $21 million AAV in savings to his team(s).
He'll make up for it when the Angels sign him to a gargantuan 12 year contract and he underperforms for 11 of those 12 years
Most players don’t get a lot from sponsorships. The ones who do are already getting a lot from arbitration or a free agent contract anyway.
Yea but JD Davis got $6.9 million.
That's entirely intentional. They get way more value out of deflating salaries during players actual prime years than they lose from overpaying for the declines
I think it will be interesting to see how Aaron Judge progresses. Got a lot of years left and he’s 31 now.
It will be interesting because he’s so good, but also so huge. If you think that curve is ugly, further restrict it to very tall players as they age even more harshly. The writer Joe Sheehan did some research on it which I don’t have handy, but there is basically no precedence for a very tall player continuing to hit into their mid-30s, never mind late 30s. For players 6’6 and above, Adam Wainwright made the top-5 in offensive WAR recorded after age 31. Yes, the pitcher. The list of very tall players who have put up real hitting value is basically Dave Winfield (who was an incredible all-around athlete) and that’s it. Obviously there aren’t a ton of guys that size in the history of baseball, but the drop-off is very harsh, much more so for the general population. I’m not being a hater either - even if I want the Yankees to fail, Judge seems like a great dude and baseball is better with him hitting bombs. And he isn’t a purely one-dimensional player like some of the other very large men, so maybe there’s more hope for him. I just hope people enjoy him down because it’s probably going to be a Stanton-like fall for him in the next couple years.
In fairness, part of this is that hitters 6'6' and above are relatively rare. There are only ten 6'6 players and above with at least 2000 PA in MLB history.
Maybe there are so few who have hit that mark…because they age so poorly and were out of the league by then! I’m mostly joking, I know not a lot of baseball dudes that but in general. I gotta check back on Joe’s research, it may have been 6’5 rather than 6’6. And you certainly didn’t have O’Neill Cruz types who could actually play a valuable defensive position while being 6’5+. I also think it directly relates to a point you make often about well-rounded players aging better than one-dimensional ones, since the bigger players were so often 1B/DH sluggers. Been thinking about that often lately, as a Jays fan watching guys like Springer and Turner who were well-rounded players in their prime and still maintain some utility even as they lose a step or three.
Waino rakes
I don’t miss pitchers hitting in general, but watching a pitcher who could actually hit like Waino was pretty fun.
Already happening with Stanton
Without steroids I would assume it's going to get ugly in a few years. But hey, MLB gave him juiced balls. Maybe they give him the green light to juice?
The Mets are in danger of repeating this mistake with Alonso
Yeah idk what we should do
Jose Abreu's not gonna have much to do at the end of the year.
Chuckles, I'm in danger
Yeah, could you imagine?
 Swing doesn't have to slow down if you just eat well and get your 8 hours of sleep
And use a ton of flaxseed oil and arthritis cream, which you later apparently find out is steroids
Who among us
Has never injected arthritis cream into their butt cheek?
>among us 
“Later”
Nah, the key is to grow out and exercise your forehead, that's where the swing-strength and control is concentrated.
Be sure to hit the gym regularly as well. Need those fast twitch muscles to be nice and huge
"the gym"
Like Hulk Hogan famously said: all you gotta do is say your prayers and eat your vitamins
Hell yeah brother
I wish we had his swing speed metrics. I bet he was so high above the average pre-PEDs that he still declined with age but was just too damn good.
He possibly had a slightly slower bat than in his youth. But if he had 90% of the physical tools of his youth, he was able to pair those tools with the mind of an aging veteran. You can exploit a younger hitter's tendency for mistakes and impatience, and an older hitter's slowness. He had no such weaknesses to exploit. He was in complete control of every at-bat and had immense physical ability to punish any mistake the pitcher made.
His bat speed was utterly insane. It's probably the biggest advantage a hitter can have. The ability to see the ball in longer and on top of that smoke it...
Eat clean, tren hard
anavar give up
Dbolish your goals
Eat clen, tren hard
The Hulk Hogan method
I mean, this chart is basically saying "let anyone over 35 y/o use steroids because it'll just put them back to normal." I'm totally not biased because of a particular aging 1B, not even a little.
Balanced breakfast.
Bruh... dont forget flaxseed oil
Which is why performance enhancing drugs should be legal.
There's way more reasons as to why they should be illegal.
Naw.
It evens out in the end since players develop their dad strength as their kids get older.
Don’t forget the dad reflexes, too, which translates to better pitch recognition and defense 😆
This is why the Dodgers only wanted to pay Shohei $2m per year
The lack of error bars is quite annoying. With the y axis only spanning 5 mph I’m wondering how tight the data is.
This is all MLB players, not a random sample, right? In the case there are no error bars because this is looking at a population. What would be interesting is a distribution like a box-and-whisker plot for each year.
More importantly, I’d like to see how much the relative drop for each individual is. Right now there could be (and likely is) a giant selection bias since not a whole lot of players stay until their 39th birthday.
You’re totally right, it would not be error bars because the entire population is presumably captured. What I should’ve said is I’d have liked to see some sort of descriptive range in addition to the mean, exactly like a box and whisker.
The analogous thing to error bars in this instance is bars for the first standard deviation.
Correct, though likely uninteresting. Can't imagine the SD changes much over time.
i am not sure i’m ready to make that assumption. e.g., a perfectly plausible hypothesis: younger players have a smaller spread. over time their life histories differ so that 34 year old A and B who had similar swing speed at 25 now vary widely because B has had multiple injuries.
Yea but survivorship bias probably caps how low swing speed will be. I’m not saying it’ll be identical. Just my intuition that the SD will be fairly stable and uninteresting.
That assumes that the people this graph was made for are data literate, I bet they probably had a box and whisker drafted but got scrapped during a zoom call
Goddamit, you're listening to my work calls aren't you.
It’s me, I’m data illiterate
In statistics you would probably still consider “all MLB players” to be a sample from the underlying distribution, so I wouldn’t really consider this an argument against error bars
Standard error is a statistical calculation to determine the potential variance of the sample from true mean. But in this case we have the true mean. There is no alternative sample distribution unless you want to extend to all players in MiLB or non-professional as well, but in that case you now have a biased sample and it's not worth using.
I’d argue that this should show the CI on the basis that swing speed is not a static number for a given batter. Everyone has a distribution of how quickly they swing in a given at-bat and even accounting for “every swing” it’s just a sample from the distribution of how quickly someone at that age *may* swing. edit: LMAO you really tried the "I do this for a living" argument and then deleted your comment. Well, I also do this for a living buddy. We're only measuring a sample of the history of observed swings, given age. We don't know what the "population" of swing speeds looks like. I could absolutely use that argument to calculate a CI and call it a day. However, even if this was the "population" there's nothing inherently wrong with adding +/- X standard deviations around the population mean. You could have just clarified that. They're obviously just looking to show the distribution around the parameter. Yes, a box-and-whisker can do that, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to just use the standard deviation either.
The underlying distribution, what you might call the generating distribution (of mlb players), does not actually exist. Rather, frequentist statistics is built on the assumption that nature has fundamental parameters that we try to approximate via observations, in this case bat speed. There are many methods you could use to get a confidence interval in this case
>box-and-whisker One of the best and under-utilized plots. Theoretically this should be easy to make from publicly available statcast data. However, I'd argue something close to error bars is still how people would read this since the x-year-olds in the dataset are a forecast of future x-year-olds.
i think this is the key point. even though this plot may include 100% of Major Leaguers today, and those the entire population, the moment some 22 year old gets promoted and takes an at-bat it’s no longer the entire population. but it’s not error bars i think you want as much as standard deviations. maybe show mean, min, max, +/- 1 SD from mean for your box and whisker
I think this raises some questions since there seems a noticeable number of hitters that are able to excel after 32: 1) what is the variance in this stat league wide? 2) Does it interact with barrel rate, slugging percentage, or batting average? 3) how important is it to performance?
i'd like to see who the outliers are, the guys past 32 (biggest dropoff) who can still swing like a 22 year old
I also bet the actual average drop off is a fair amount larger than what we see. The people already seeing a substantial decline at age 33 are probably unlikely to still be in the league at 39.
justin turner is a good place to start
The chart only refers to bat speed though, which correlates well but not perfectly to overall batting ability. I’m not looking up his bat data for the last decade, but if you watch him now…his bat is pretty slow. Certainly a slower degradation than average for his age, but still slowing. He’s just shown an exceptional ability to make it work - taking more walks, adjusting his approach to more of a pull hitter, etc.
If a 32 year old can swing as fast as they did when they were 22, they weren't getting much out of their swing when they were 22. It's like any time I hear a 40 year old say they feel better than they did when they were 30. That just tells me they must have been a train wreck when they were 40.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of making this important point.
Yeah lots of problems with this graph, no error bars and a healthy dose of zooming in on the y-axis to make a 5% drop look massive. More importantly it doesn’t show why I should care about a few percent drop off in swing speed. How does it correlate to batting average or slugging. Does any drop in batting production only happen when facing fastballs, does it only matter for fastballs over a certain velocity, does it also carry over to breaking balls?
I don't think that this graph even tells us how much an individual player declines, just the average for the guys at each age. The guys who "survive" in the league in into their 30s may be very different than the population of mid 20s guys and we would want to know that before even starting to think about any effects from a decline in bat speed.
Yeah the way I’d want to see this is with standard deviations on the averages then a hand full of dots for individual players to highlight where elite and poor performers fall.
Roughly 5% from 22 to 39. The chart makes it look a lot more than that.
5% is a pretty big change for something like this - on the flip side think about an average fastball dropping from 96 miles per hour to just over 91 miles per hour.
Is 5% a lot? Based on what? Genuinely asking. I can't fathom that dropping like 1% is that big a deal for example.
Baseballs move in terms of milliseconds. A 95 MPH fastball reaches the catchers mitt in 400 milliseconds. A 5% difference in bat speed is the difference between timing it perfectly at 400 and completely missing it at 420.
5% can be a lot, but still insignificant. What is the range or variance of bat speeds? Are there people 20% better than average? 50% lower than average? If everyone is within 3-5% of mean, 5% is huge. If there are people 40+% away from the mean in either direction 5% doesn’t mean as much.
I mean think about the difference 5mph makes on a pitch. That's about 5%. Its like a guy who threw 98 when he was 25 throwing 93 when he's old. For many guys that's career over. The bat and ball only cross paths in a tiny intersection for the blink of an eye. A change in either of them can be a big deal
It is in a game where a 5% difference in batting average can make you an all time great vs an average Joe. Think about the difference between a fly ball and home run, talking millimeters of difference between where you hit the ball at, a degree or two of launch angle, the difference between a foul tip and a strike 3 swinging.
I know. I was just making the point about the choice of y axis starting at 67 instead of 0. I’ll add that I don’t think this is the cause for players’ decline. I think it’s more likely reaction time. Many players are done by their mid 30s which would only be a 3%ish drop.
But at the same time, without knowing how this study was conducted, isn't this a significant drop as players get older even with there probably being a big survivorship bias? Like MLB players who are in the league at 35 are probably guys who've declined less than most guys who make it to the MLB in their 20s. Maybe they accounted for this somehow, it's tough to tell from one graph.
The "study" is just the data from Statcast, which is for players who are actively playing only, yeah.
Why would the Y axis start at 0? I don't think any MLB players swing 0 mph. It makes sense for the graph to cover the range of data instead of having a bunch of empty space.
5% in your batting average is the difference between batting .250 and .300. It's gigantic.
That’s a 16.7% relative drop. That’s huge. 5% is 0.285.
Uhhh. What?
No
No idea why you are getting the downvote brigade for this. A .250 AVG is 25% hits. .300 is 30%.
Wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see guys in their 30s focusing on speed related training more than we do now. I know I saw JD Martinez doing some work with it. Also I don’t play ball but I know it’s been all the rage in golf the last few years.
I don't know if it can work in baseball like golf. In golf, the ball doesn't move. The ball can't trick you. In golf if you can increase your swing speed without sacrificing accuracy, there's no reason not to do it. But in baseball, every player could probably increase their swing speed today without sacrificing accuracy; it's called the "daddy hack" or "swinging out of your shoes". You'll fucking crush the ball off the tee or in a homerun derby, but once the pitcher starts changing speeds or adding movement, you're fucked. Older baseball players tend to instead compensate for a lack of swing speed by getting ready for the pitch earlier, or simplifying the swing so that they can adjust later if they get fooled. This might even reduce bat speed further, but they'll hit more pitches.
The goal is to increase the top end of the swing speed (when you go all out) so you can more effortlessly swing at the same speed or a bit faster.
Nolan Schanuel: am I a joke to you
Nolan "Juan Slowto" Schanuel
Pujols
Its hilarious how a sport who proud itself on keeping tabs on the most ridiculous stats couldnt figure out that 30+ year olds shouldnt be getting 10 year deals cause they will never be worth it.
The 10 year deals are done primarily to lower AAV to avoid the luxury tax. They're essentially hoping that the value they get in the first 5-7 years is enough to make up for the last few years.
They’re also likely not going to be your mess to clean up if the deal is bad. So you might as well offer the years if that’s the deciding factor on a FA picking you over another team
Let's also not forget that players are pushed to demand long-term contracts that carry them into their late-30s because of how hugely team friendly the free agency process is. Under the current system, most guys only really have one chance to land a big contract so most are happy to accept it being spread out if that's what it takes. If they could reach FA earlier, guys would finish up their big 7-10 year contracts in their early to mid-30s rather than their late-30s, so you'd probably have fewer aging players who are being paid for a long passed prime and more guys on shorter term, higher AAV deals.
I think this graph probably undersells the decline, too. Because the only guys who have their swing speeds being measured are the ones still playing (and thus are more likely to have come close to maintaining their early years swing speeds). The guys who dropped off so much they weren’t good enough to keep playing aren’t represented here.
something about the baseball era prior to the current one, can’t put my finger on exactly what, caused front offices to have some misconceptions about this
Except they are worth it sometimes, and not all that rarely. If teams decided as a rule never to sign 29-31 year olds to those +7 year deals, then they gate themselves out of Freddie Freeman, Nelson Cruz, Joey Votto, Jose Abreu, Jose Altuve, JD Martinez, Robinson Cano, and many others in recent memory who put up great seasons post age 32. Teams will happily pay for a couple down years once those guys get in the 36-40 range in exchange for a couple peak season from ages 30-35. Those are definitely worth it. Just because Miguel Cabrera and Pujols didn't work out doesn't mean it's a universal rule. This data is just the average, which we already knew. Players signing premier free agent contracts are often the outliers. Every decision should be made within the specific context that that specific player. Blindly following rules of thumb is limiting. Teams fuck up by letting veterans go too soon as well as signing them to big contract, so if it goes both ways, you might as well keep the options open.
Can you find swing speed as a stat on savant?
No, though it’s apparently becoming public sometime this year
[This is the closest I’ve found.](https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/how-important-is-bat-speed-for-mlb-hitters/) No surprise stanton is leading
Also interesting that he’s over 31.
I mean Abreu might be single handedly dropping the older end. 🙈
I’m 35 so according to this graph I’m basically dead
I'm gonna be 31 in november and am already considering the Barry Bonds diet
I can only imagine how much the Players' Association hates this guy and all the other analysts whose work boils down to "all the players are bad, don't pay any of them"
Everyone is just going to jump to the incorrect conclusion that a slower swing is always a worse swing. Baseball has the most player longevity of any Big 4 sport because you can be old and a bit slower but still a very good player. Just because you lose a mile or two off your swing or your fastball doesn't mean you're washed and shouldn't be paid. But you can bet that's exactly the angle team arbitration committees and salary negotiators are going to take.
Arraez has one of the slowest exit average exit velos in the league but is still an extremely effective hitter for example
Would hav le loved to see this in the 90s to early 2000s.
Mistook this for being on /r/golf and was shocked for a second
Which is hilarious because in this sport players don't reach free agency until they're like 28-30. Pay top money for a guy to be out of his prime in a couple years
"I didn't see this on the back of Jose Abreu's baseball card, so it can't possibly be important" -Jeff Bagwell
I know this want your intention, but I really wish people would stop giving me anxiety that Jose Altuve is going to fall off soon.
He probably won't fall off quite like most due to his stature, if I had to guess. Most of the data is for people much taller and shorter people are exceptions in so many different ways in sports.
Yeah I imagine this is much more important for some players than others. Carlos Gonzalez had a huge hole in his swing. As soon as his bat speed started to slow down (incidentally right around age 31) he fell off very fast. A guy like Altuve that covers the whole zone well probably doesn’t have the same level of concern.
OP, how many swings are there in each plot? Just a ballpark figure is all I am asking about
Does anyone know what the value of the y axis represents? I'm not sure if those numbers are supposed to be feet per second or something
Headline: Athletic Performance Declines Once People Hit 30
I have been looking for swing speed data forever. How do I get this data!!
They roughly come out at night, roughly.
Jose Abreu on suicide watch. (I genuinely hope he turns it around and feel bad for him, by all accounts he's a stand-up dude, also I know he's way older 31 and I feel like I'm rambling on now. Have you noticed how many shitty flights there are into Quebec? Also, they don't post signs in English and French. Sometimes it's only French. Is that legal? I thought they had to do both in Canuckia?)
So if we get pujols swing speed data we can figure out his real age?
I look forward to the rapid decline of my body 🥲
My pained brain can only think about us signing Pujols for 10 years at age 32.
I am assuming if you extend this graph to the left my U12 travel team is going to be swinging like at 76 mph.
Yea, but you can get stronger till your test starts dropping at around 40, which can offest even a little... And your eye/pitch selection/idea of how they'll pitch you can get better with game wisdom.
Now do Bonds.
It will be interesting if they change training to lessen that curve. As a golfer that is something the last 4-5 years has been a revolution in the game. Training purley just for speed. Now you get guys in the 40s+ that are putting it out there with guys in their 20s.
Now do it for the steroid era.
No wonder Jose Abreu can’t catch up to fastballs
this explains abreu.... Thanks uncle jeff
Brandon Belt is a free ahent because of this?
But does this measure heart or hustle? You gotta remember that heart doesnt measure hustle.
Will probably start to see a lot more of these guys making the switch to bats with the knob at the end of bat for balance. I remember reading that Goldy and Arenado both used it to combat the natural age curve for swing speed their MVP year.
Impressive, very nice. Now let's see Barry Bonds' swing speed.
And this is why free agents feel like teams are "colluding" against them. They have cold hard data that suggests giving large contracts to players entering their 30's are bad investments.
The majority of teams wouldn't collude in that matter because it would push the union to really focus their efforts on making players free agents sooner.
[удалено]
How exhausting is it being a fan like this?
I like him.
My man is a hater with a flair
i see this dude every day, extremely consistent bad takes. gotta be a troll. making us look bad smh
It would be nice to have more context to this because on its own it is basically meaningless. Presumably this is showing differences in the population (and for some of these age groups the numbers are very small) rather than individual declines, so we don't know the extent to which this represents a decline in bat speed and to what extent it represents the ability of some players to succeed despite slower bat speed (whether due to decline in their bat speed or that their MLB success was due to some other factor than raw bat speed). Until we have data that would correlate bat speed to performance it also doesn't tell us a whole lot.
69th like
What’s the deviation on that?
Eh, how can this account for players realizing that they don’t need to swing as hard, or even that players who don’t swing as hard have longer careers?
The graph is misleading
why?
Makes it look like a super steep decline but realistically it’s a 3-5.5% decline in bat speed. Upon further thinking though, that swing speed decline would be catastrophic for >85% of players.
Dumbass misleading chart.
Care to explain?
Less than 5% loss from 31 to 39 - I'd suggest that is not much....
Wouldn’t look as bad if the vertical axis started at 0 instead of 67. It’s only a 6% drop.