The Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance

I was having a discussion with RJ today about the age of our respective teams and what that signifies, if anything. So I spent some time tonight taking a look at the breakdown of ages for every player on a 40-man roster. When I first started, I was looking for some quickly accessible information through StatsLab, however I couldn't find the information anywhere. So instead of doing something normal with my Friday night, I did a silly thing where I copied every PEBA player's age into an excel table and found the average of each team.

I thought the results were fun so I figured I'd share.
This graph shows the average age of a team. There are two stark drop-offs at the tail end of the chart between Kentucky and Canton, and then again at Reno and Yuma. This graph got me thinking. How do older teams coincide with younger teams in terms of overall success? I decided to chart it out...
This... wasn't as interesting or as stark as I thought it might be. While it does show that, as a whole, teams with older players are generally more successful, the difference is so minute as to be insignificant. This also doesn't take into account the fact that more historically successful teams generally have more money to go get - you guessed it - older, more expensive players in free agency.

While the exercise didn't really yield anything too earth-shattering, I thought it was very interesting that there wasn't a clear delineation between old and young teams in terms of raw winning percentage.

Below are the data set I used for the above graphs and then some fun facts about some other stuff I learned while doing this...
FUN FACTS...

1. The youngest player on a PEBA roster just celebrated their twentieth birthday and is currently in the process of dismantling pitchers in AAA. Clyde Stinton of Bakersfield has accrued 8 days of service time thus far where he had seventeen at-bats to a lackluster performance... but of course for a then-nineteen year old, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

2. The oldest player on a roster is (of course) the dinosaur himself: Rob Raines. In fact, Rob is SO old that if he did retire (heaven forfend), just by removing him from the equation drops Fargo down 4 spots into the 25th, or second youngest team.

3. Only three teams are currently using all 40 of their roster spots: Arlington, Canton, and London.

4. The team with the least amount of players on the 40 man is Crystal Lake with a paltry 29!

5. The team with the most players 30+ on their team is London with 21!

6. The team with the least players 30+ on their team is Yuma with 5.

Wow thanks Ken! This is really interesting.

That's kinda scary, to think that Fargo has played so well this season and they are so young...

I enjoyed that, I must admit it’s normally a conscious decision of mine to aim for the 22-28 age bracket for the players but haven’t been in Hartford enough to fully get there. Always causes me problems in free agency as all the best players are near their mid-30’s (and expensive lol)

So how come Yuma is not included in any of your charts? Are we so good we’re literally “off the chart”?

Bulldozers wrote:So how come Yuma is not included in any of your charts? Are we so good we’re literally “off the chart”?

Ahh, there are 2 Fargo's instead!

Bulldozers wrote:So how come Yuma is not included in any of your charts? Are we so good we’re literally “off the chart”?

I'm sorry Bob! I'm getting over a cold and not totally with it. Yuma is the youngest team. IDK how I managed to have two Fargos. I'll update

EDIT: All updated! Sorry for the confusion. I've had a magnificent cold since Tuesday and I haven't quite been all there mentally (maybe a trip down to the asylum is in order... I hear they have some nice nurses)

Well this is getting more interesting...
After posting this last night, I was thinking about the breakdown of ages between divisions. To me, this is where we can start to see some overall health of the league beginning to develop. The average age of a player in the IL is 28.6240 while the average age of their SL counterpart is 28.1934.
The overall age difference is pretty stark. If we include the two divisions as a whole on this table, you can start to see just how disparate these numbers are. Last night I was somewhat dismissive of the small differences between players, however thinking more about it in this context, it seems to me that players in the IL will generally have an extra half a year of service time. This means more expensive teams more prone to injuries.

As I was considering reasons for this, the most obvious seems to be the most correct: The SL has a more historically active contingent of GMs. Hopefully this equates with IL GMs having a more long-term strategy and begin starting to consider growing their talent organically instead of being forced to either part with young controllable assets if they're in the middle of a chase or retool without a general idea for a path forward with older filler players.

I'm hoping that with the resurgence in PEBA GMs -- especially in the IL -- we will see these numbers start to coalesce.

I guess I'm not terribly surprised that there isn't much correlation between success and average age of the players. I would expect good teams to be a mix of those who've been good for some time and have aged their talent and up-and-coming teams who are graduating contingents of high end prospects to the majors.

As one of the older teams in the league, or roster is filled with older players who couldn't land a job anywhere else and were picked up to fill gaps while we rebuild.

Also... I'm pretty disappointed that StatsLab doesn't have anywhere to make this data readily available...

Featherheads wrote:

Bulldozers wrote:So how come Yuma is not included in any of your charts? Are we so good we’re literally “off the chart”?

I'm sorry Bob! I'm getting over a cold and not totally with it. Yuma is the youngest team. IDK how I managed to have two Fargos. I'll update

EDIT: All updated! Sorry for the confusion. I've had a magnificent cold since Tuesday and I haven't quite been all there mentally (maybe a trip down to the asylum is in order... I hear they have some nice nurses)

No apologies necessary, Ken. We are quite experienced with mistakes down here in Yuma. And yes, our nurses are nice, our water will replenish your health, and the sunshine will restore your soul. Come for a visit, stay for a lifetime!

Thanks for posting Ken, interesting stuff.

I would actually be surprised if old man Raines hung it up. He's OPS+ is still over 130. I think he get's another two year contract this offseason, if he decides to keep it going.

I thought sure we'd have seen a Codgers joke in the thread by now...

Interesting stuff, Ken, I'm glad you took the trouble to put all this together.

Featherheads wrote: 1. The youngest player on a PEBA roster just celebrated their twentieth birthday and is currently in the process of dismantling pitchers in AAA. Clyde Stinton of Bakersfield has accrued 8 days of service time thus far where he had seventeen at-bats to a lackluster performance... but of course for a then-nineteen year old, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

The Bears are excited to see what Clyde can do following a full season of AAA. We're nervous about bringing such a young hitter into the majors too early, but sometimes a hitter just won't be denied.