Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Is Adrian Beltre Bending The Aging Curve?

The graph below shows his OPS+ at each age starting at 19 continuing through this year at age 35. Then a table of the actual numbers. 5 of his best 6 seasons have come (if we include this year) at ages 31-35. Except for his age 25 season (in 2004) none of his seasons before age 30 are very close to any of his age 31-35 seasons




19 73
20 102
21 114
22 91
23 97
24 88
25 163
26 93
27 105
28 112
29 109
30 83
31 141
32 131
33 139
34 137
35 143
 
If we did pairs of seasons and average them (just a simple average), the last two are the best


19-20 87.5
21-22 102.5
23-24 92.5
25-26 128
27-28 108.5
29-30 96
31-32 136
33-34 138

I found all the players who had 300+ PAs at every age from 20-35 like Beltre. Then I averaged their OPS+ at each age. Here is the graph with trend line using a polynomial order 2 equation.




Those players were

Sam Crawford       
Ty Cobb                 
Mel Ott                 
Eddie Mathews      
Hank Aaron           
Al Kaline               
Roberto Clemente 
Frank Robinson     
Vada Pinson          
Ted Simmons        
Buddy Bell            
Robin Yount          
Rickey Henderson 
Roberto Alomar     
Ivan Rodriguez      
Alex Rodriguez     

Beltre averaged a 105.18 OPS+ from age 20-30. From 31-35, it is 138.2. So 138.2/105.18 = 1.314. So he has done 31.4% better. Here are the same ratios for the other guys


Roberto Clemente   1.407
Rickey Henderson  1.109
Al Kaline   1.051
Frank Robinson  1.049
Sam Crawford          1.046
Robin Yount  1.039
Hank Aaron  1.026
Roberto Alomar  0.978
Buddy Bell   0.970
Alex Rodriguez  0.961
Mel Ott                    0.936
Ivan Rodriguez  0.923
Ty Cobb                    0.871
Vada Pinson  0.852
Eddie Mathews         0.794
Ted Simmons  0.781

I also used wRC+ from Fangraphs. I found all the guys who had 3000+ PAs through age 30 and 1000+ PAs from 31-35. Then I took their Old to Young ratio. Beltre is near the top, doing about 33% better at his old age. The average ratio for the group was .953, meaning they did 4.7% worse. There were 1286 players at the young age and 781 of them made it to the old age. Here is the top 15


Ken Caminiti 1.505
Bret Boone 1.379
Roberto Clemente 1.348
Augie Galan 1.327
Luis Gonzalez 1.327
Adrian Beltre 1.327
Sammy Sosa 1.325
Jerry Grote 1.320
Hal Chase 1.306
Frank White 1.299
Mark McGwire 1.284
Brady Anderson 1.267
Tony Phillips 1.265
Willie Stargell 1.263
Ozzie Smith 1.250

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