Part I

Super Young

            This is intended to be a 19-part series based on a 4-hour research project; in other words, not really anything too serious.   It occurred to me that it would be useful sometimes to reference players by the age at which they reached their prime.   Dontrelle Willis and Chad Billingsley, for example, obviously had their best seasons at a very young age.  Billingsley was a rotation starter for the Dodgers from 2006 to 2012, and he was pretty good every year.   He’s only 38 years old NOW, and he’s been out of the game for so long that I am guessing most of you have a hard time placing the name.    Jose Bautista and Jim Thome, on the other hand, had their best seasons late.   Bautista never hit more than 16 home runs and never hit higher than .254 until he was 29, then he figured something out and was one of the most feared hitters in baseball for seven years.  Thome couldn’t break the Indians’ lineup until he was 25; they had Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, Kenny Lofton, Julio Franco, Sandy Alomar Jr., Brian Giles, Omar Vizquel and Eddie Murray, so there wasn’t a lot of open space there for a young player, but he hit about 400 home runs after he turned 30. 

            I thought it might be useful to figure the "peak age" for each player in baseball history.  I will call it "peak age" because "center age" doesn’t exactly work as a phrase, although what we’re actually talking about is more the center of the player’s career than the peak.  How do we find that?  

            I multiplied each player’s Win Shares each season by his age as of July 1 in that season, calling this the "Peak Age Contribution".  Then I added up the Peak Age Contributions for each player and divided by their career Win Shares.   Dontrelle Willis’ Peak Age computes to 23.10 years; Chad Billingsley to 23.90.  Those are low numbers; a player does not ordinarily reach the center of his career at 23 or 24.  Jose Bautista, on the other hand, has a Peak Age 31.30, and Jim Thome of 30.71.   That’s old; the normal Peak Age is 26 to 27.

            I figured the Peak Age for every player in my data who hasn’t played since 2019, a total of 14,039 players.  Then I divided those 14,039 players into 19 groups:

The Super Young and Super Old Players were supposed to be 1%; you can’t break it exactly where it matches the percentage because there are huge numbers of ties.   There are lots and lots of players in major league history who only played or only had value in one season.  If you only had value at age 23, your Peak Age is 23.00000.  There are 423 players in baseball history whose peak age is 23.00000, similar or larger numbers at every age from 21 to 30, so there are a LOT of ties, so you can’t break the list to exactly match the goal of getting 6% of players into Group 14, or whatever. 

            So let’s talk about Group 1; tomorrow I’ll talk about Group 2, etc.   I hope these don’t become long articles; I’ve got better stuff I should be doing.  Anyway, 1% of 14,039 would be 140, but there are actually 164 players in the group.  Their peak ages range from 17.0000 to 20.0000.  

            There are three players in the group whose Peak Age is 17.  Those three are Bill Gallagher, Tony Madigan and Dave Skaugstad.  Bill Gallagher pitched about 50 innings in the American Association in 1883, not very well, and then pitched some in the allegedly-major-league-although-God-knows-why Union Association in 1884.  His career ended at age 18, and he died at age 33. 

            Tony Madigan was a 5-foot-5 inch, 126 pound 17-year-old who made 13 starts for Washington 1886, which is item number 7,482 on my list of reasons that it is ridiculous to pretend that 19^th century baseball was major league baseball.  That was one of the worst teams in major league history, excuse me, one of the worst teams in "major league" history, although they had lots and lots of interesting people and familiar names on that team—Paul Hines, Dupee Shaw, Connie Mack.   Connie Mack wasn’t the only Hall of Famer there; Hank O’Day, Hall of Fame umpire, was on that team.  Davy Force, a huge star of ten years earlier, who helped trigger the formation of the National League by jumping from team to team in the National Association until the owners couldn’t stand it anymore.   The manager of the team for the second half of the season was John Gaffney, who was nicknamed The King of Umpires.   Ed (Cannonball) Crane was on that team; he was a powerful man who set numerous long-distance throwing records. ..charismatic and colorful figure; you should look him up and read more about him.  He went on Albert Spalding’s famous world tour after the 1888 season, before 1889.  He had apparently never touched liquor before that tour, but decided to give it a try before they left the states and by the time they returned was such a committed alcoholic that he was unable to perform his athletic responsibilities for much of the tour.   He drank himself out of the league and out of his marriage in a couple of years, and committed suicide a few years after that.  Madigan, on the other hand, almost managed to outlive Connie Mack, not quite. 

            The third player who peaked at 17 was Dave Skaugstad, who I presume was a bonus baby with the 1957 Reds.  In that era a player who signed for a "large" bonus had to go directly to the majors for a year or so until he could go to the minors.  Skaugstad pitched in two games at the end of the 1957 season, got good enough results, but went to the minors in 1958, where he walked 150 batters in 121 innings.    After three years in the minors, always comically bad, he retired for three years, returned and tried it again in 1963, still only 24 years old, but wasn’t any better.  He never came close to getting back to the majors after that season, but he is still alive now, 83 years old.

            The best player in this group—which is not saying much—but the best of these 164 players was Willie McGill, who was a rotation starter at the age of 16 in the Players League in 1890.  He wouldn’t be 17 until the season ended.  Willie McGill and Cy Young both made their major league debuts in Cleveland in 1890 and had similar records, Young pitching in the National League, McGill in the Player’s Association, player’s league, whatever you call it.   Young was 9-7, 3.43 ERA; McGill was 11-9, 4.15.  McGill lasted until 1896 and was decent, finishing 71-73 with an ERA+ of 100.   His peak age was 18.50. 

            In the 19^th century there were a lot of teenaged pitchers.  Monte Ward, of course, won 47 games as a teenager in 1879, although his peak is much later.  At that time, if you could throw hard and get it near the plate, that was all it took to be a major league pitcher.  The hardest throwers around were often kids, so they pitched a good share of the innings until about 1891, 1892, when professional pitching began to emerge.  

            The "best" 20^th century or 21^st century player in this group was Frank Shellenback, whose story I suspect many of you know.   He pitched 183 innings for the White Sox in 1918, pitched so-so, but was cut by the White Sox (the Black Sox) early in 1919, and was still in the minor leagues when the decision was made to ban the spitball after the 1920 season.  A short list of pitchers was "grandfathered in" when the spitball was banned, allowed to continue to throw it as long as they remained in the majors, but Shellenback, who was in the Pacific Coast League, was not protected by major league interests, thus did not make the list.

            Although it is now regarded as a "minor" league, but at that time the Pacific Coast League is more accurately described as the West Coast major league.   Not suggesting that it was fully equal to the East Coast major leagues, but there wasn’t much of a gap, and probably 30% to 50% of the players in the PCL were above major league Replacement Level.  Shellenback, allowed to throw the spitball in the PCL, won more than 300 games in the minor leagues, pitching until 1938. 

            From 1936 to 1938 he was Player/Manager of the (minor league) San Diego Padres, and was Ted Williams’ first professional manager.   Williams said of him in My Turn at Bat that "He was a wonderful, wonderful man, a man I respected as much as any I’ve known in baseball."  Bobby Doerr was also on that team.  I took the quote above from his SABR biography, written by Brian McKenna.   McKenna writes that  "Shellenback returned to the majors at long last, signing with the St. Louis Browns as a pitching coach for 1939."  I think there is a problem with that, which is that I don’t think that teams in 1939 had ‘pitching coaches’ per se; I mean, yes, he was a coach, and yes, he no doubt worked a lot with the pitchers, but I’m not aware that anyone at that time was called a "pitching coach", specifically, and I would bet that Shellenback often worked as the first base coach, the third base, and did all kinds of other coaching duties.  It wasn’t like it is now. 

            Anyway, Shellenback stayed around for a long time as a coach, became Leo Durocher’s pitching coach, and was in the majors as a coach until 1955.  He is believed to have taught Bob Shaw and Gaylord Perry to throw the spitball; Perry I think credited Shaw, but Shellenback is in there somewhere.   McKenna quoted me as saying that Shellenback was probably the best pitcher (career) in the history of the minor leagues, and I’ll take that although I don’t actually remember saying it, but it’s reasonable so I’ll accept it. 

            Since Shellenback, the most successful major league players whose careers reached their geographic center by age 20 are Edwin Correa (Rangers, 1986), Mike McQueen (Braves, 1971), Rene Lachemann (A’s, 1965), Derrell Griffith (Dodgers, 1964), Von McDaniel (Cardinals, 1957), one of the Bob Millers (Tigers, early 1950s), and Lew Krausse.  Not the Lew Krausse you remember; his father, who was 5-1 for the Philadelphia A’s in 1931-1932.  Lew Krausse Jr., a bonus baby, pitched a 3-hit shutout as an 18-year-old major leaguer just days after graduating from high school, so that was pretty impressive, to, but he actually did enough later on that he is Group 8, Early Prime.