KaiserD2
woventrap touched tangentially on a key point. Because of PEDs, in the late 1990s early 2000s, players, especially pitchers, were reliably performing at a top level at advanced ages. As a result, you really could go out in the free agent market and buy a pennant, and a number of organizations did just that. But those days are over.

DK
11:53 AM Feb 27th

gmouser
Agents can find anecdotal evidence showing the exceptions to the aging curve relatively easily. There are exceptions. The problem is that if you make contract decisions based on this, you’re betting against a mountain of data indicating it’s a losing proposition.

Can you win one of those bets? Sure. If you try it more than once, you’ll end up regressing to the mean. By the way, his aging curve is the best argument that Pujols was clean. The reason his decline shocks people is because of the PED era. Any HOF voters who are anti Bonds and Clemens and don’t vote in Pujols on their first ballot are hypocrites.
12:59 PM Feb 20th

wovenstrap
I actually think it's not that surprising. If I think back to the Abstracts where Bill discussed this, it's still a rather technical problem..... the set "includes" all these guys who are now retired, yes. We just passed through an era where the MVP for a decent stretch was a guy putting up historic numbers in his age-36-37-38-39 years. Bill has mentioned this statistical phenomenon of the set improving and shrinking over time a few times here and there, but it's a subtle point. Figuring out park effects is miles easier and people still don't *truly* get that.

It seems to me that if Pujols were performing at a decent level in the tail end of his contract, most GMs wouldn't be giving long contracts any thought at all. Pujols' complete swan dive has changed the parameters of this debate. Every GM in the country can look at the Angels and say, "Damn, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that contract......"
9:48 AM Feb 19th

bjames
There’s an important factor in the miscalculation of aging that you don’t think about until you are in the middle of it. Let’s say that you are talking about signing a 31-year-old free agent to a four-year contract, a position player coming off of a good year. The reality is that you have an expectation of roughly 1.5 good seasons out of the contract, but when you are there, people will talk to you about all of the 34-, 35- and 36-year-olds who are still having good years. His agent will talk to you about Ben Zobrist and Nelson Cruz and Edwin Encarnacion and David Freese and Yadi Molina and Yuli Gurriel and Jed Lowrey, etc., and then they’ll tell you that THIS guy, whoever it is that you are talking about, is in great shape and completely committed to his conditioning regimen, etc., etc.
But what they miss is, Ben Zobrist is the same age as Shane Victorino and Nick Swisher and Alex Rios and Brandon Phillips and Justin Morneau and Josh Hamilton and Hank Blalock and Jose Bautista. David Freese and Yadi Molina are the same as age David Wright and Grady Sizemore and Jose Reyes and Joe Mauer and Casey Kotchman and JJ Hardy and Stephen Drew and Michael Bourne and Omar Infante and Carl Crawford.
Out of sight, out of mind. You SEE the players who age well. They are right in front of you; you see them play. The ones who don’t age well disappear. You don’t give them a thought after they’re gone, and you miss the fact that they’re a large majority of the 34-year-old population of players. This causes you to misjudge the aging curve. It’s a trick of perception, just as much as those optical illusion tricks. It takes real discipline to avoid mis-perceiving the risk of sudden loss of value as a player ages. I think Raincheck has it right. It is a damning commentary on the historical business acumen of baseball owners that behaving rationally in the cases of Harper and Machado arouses such suspicion.

3:48 PM Feb 18th

wovenstrap
Two points: It may be that Bill remembers something that was totally common knowledge at the time among people working in baseball but that regular fans were not privy to in the same way. That's to address Kaiser's point.

Second, one of the consequences of the arrival of advanced metrics personnel in the front office of every team is that we would get closer to a situation in which all teams actually *would* arrive at the same conclusions about the players, and hence making it difficult for a player to sort of sucker a team into giving him an inflated contract or whatever. I think anyone who has played eveen somewhat semi-serious fantasy baseball has run into this problem, we're all reading the same blogs, in that instance. My point is that that sort of thing could potentially look a lot like collusion, every team simultaneously recognizing that Pedro Verdad has a hole in his swing or whatever.
5:03 PM Feb 17th

18hippo
But when Brad Brach, a middling reliever, says he got zero offers in November and Decmber, then six or seven teams all make identical offers, that's pretty clear evidence of collusion. Or as he said, I know they all have algorithms, but should some of them end up with slightly different numbers?
It's reminiscent of the steroid era, when we constructed explanations for Sammy Sosa's large head and acne.

2:00 PM Feb 16th

steve161
Most of what I know about labor law as it applies to baseball comes from John Helyar's The Lords of Baseball. This is on page 358-9 of the 1995 Ballantine paperback:

"Back in the winter following the 1981 strike, free-agent activity had slowed. Clubs were clearly reluctant to sign other clubs' players. So the union filed a grievance charging the Lords with 'acting in concert.' Such behavior, on either side, was explicitly barred in the first post-Messersmith labor contract, at the owners' insistence. The Koufax-Drysdale holdout was still a fresh memory in 1976. The owners wanted no such bloc bargaining by free agents. Nor did they want a Jerry Kapstein--an agent with a big client stable--orchestrating the movement of whole groups of players. Marvin Miller agreed to forbid the players from 'acting in concert' as long as the owners were forbidden as well. The language had been renewed in each subsequent labor contract."
7:11 AM Feb 16th

77royals
shthar
Baseball needs more billionare egomaniacs for owners. Not these MBA nerds.


So they can compete with more millionaire egomaniac players.

Who cares. They're all greedy, and dealing in amounts of money that none of us can truly comprehend. Nothing they do affects our lives in any way. It's their battle to fight, not ours.

5:55 PM Feb 15th

Brian
I get the sense that back in the 1980s when a team signed a player to an what was viewed as an outlandish contract, the reaction from the other owners was: "You can't be doing this. Now we have to pay those prices to compete and we can't afford it."

My sense is now when a team overpays, in the eyes of the other owners, the reaction is "OK - good luck with that. Glad we don't have that contract"
3:31 PM Feb 15th

bjames
steve161
Wasn't the owners' collusion also at least implicitly prohibited by the provision in the collective bargaining agreement that was intended to prevent another Koufax-Drysdale c


Totally mystifying comment. If something is explicitly prohibited by the National Labor Relations Board, what difference would it make if it was implicitly prohibited by something else?
2:58 PM Feb 15th

MarisFan61
(typo -- going on NOW)
1:17 PM Feb 15th