Conventional wisdom has it that a professional baseball player reaches his peak batting performance at age 27. Research by two Elon University alumni, whose work in a general studies seminar last spring led to a presentation for the Society for American Baseball Research, shows otherwise, with what they hope is potential for changing the way Major League Baseball teams structure future contracts.
James Etchells ’10 and Andrew Sturm ’10 partnered in class to not only debunk conventional wisdom but to also show that older players give coaches and general managers more bang for the buck. Their paper, “The Prime of a Major League Baseball Player’s Offensive Career,” used data from the past decade for each professional ballplayer who made at least 350 plate appearances in a season.
Professor John Burbridge taught the upper-level general studies seminar, “Baseball and Statistics,” where the two alumni conducted their study. He represented his former students in Atlanta this summer for a poster presentation at the 40th annual convention of the Society for American Baseball Research.
Is the research groundbreaking? Yes and no. Etchells and Sturm point to previous work that measured performance by homerun production or, in the case of pitchers, the number of strikeouts and walks allowed. Both of the older studies cast doubt on the notion that 27 is the prime of a player’s career.
However, the Elon alumni delved deeper into various elements of offensive production to establish a “runs created” formula for five age groups, and the data showed how in recent years, players 35 or older proved to be the best at creating those runs. The 29-31 cohort finished a close second.
“The way players are able to exercise, and the way they’re built physically, they have more longevity. Some guys can play into their 40s,” Etchells said in a recent interview. “Earlier on, maybe in the ‘60s or ‘70s, when players had to retire due to lack of physical conditioning, 27 was considered the middle of their career.”
How did the myth develop, and why does it persist? One possible explanation is that some players do, in fact, have their best season at 27. More likely is that conventional wisdom is simply repeated by pundits without a closer examination of offensive statistics.
That’s one lesson Sturm derived from his work.
“You just can’t take what’s told to you without looking into it. After doing this research, we really couldn’t find it was the best year,” Sturm said. “The people who get all the press, and who are listened to, may not have all the correct information. You should look into things more before you simply believe it.”
Etchells and Sturm lived next door to each other for their last two years at Elon and shared a common passion for the sport. Both are New York Yankees fans. They took classes together and double majored in accounting and business administration. Both, coincidentally, also accepted offers from IBM following their academic studies, though Sturm works out of the New York region and Etchells lives in Raleigh, N.C.
“We were pretty surprised by the results. You always hear about 27 being an optimal age, but as you can see from the results, it’s not the case,” Etchells said. “There are a lot of different spins and it matters what perspective you’re looking at it from, the player, agent, or the front office of the Major League Baseball team deciding on contract stipulations.”
One aspect of offensive production noticeably absent from the study was any significant exploration of steroids among ballplayers. Their reasoning for the deliberate omission is simple: There’s no way to confirm who “juiced” and who stayed clean, and it’s likely that steroid use spanned all age groups, which would make it a nonfactor if everyone’s numbers improved.
Burbridge said he hopes to submit the paper to a peer-reviewed academic journal in the coming months.
“What really was neat on their part was downloading every batter for these years with the 350 plate appearances or more,” Burbridge said as he lauded the study. “The work verifies what a few others have said, that the peak performance age is moving upward.”