I have ideas from time to time that help me think about baseball (as if I needed help in that area of my life. What I really need is ideas that will help free me from thinking obsessively about baseball, but that’s another essay altogether….)  I like to think that some of these ideas preceded my interest in sabermetrics, or at least made me receptive to sabermetric thinking, but the truth is that I’ve been using them to structure my thoughts about baseball for so long, I can’t remember NOT having these ideas.

The one I’ll share with you now derives from (or leads into, I’m not sure) Bill’s early articulation of players’ peak years, around the age of 27. It’s a semi-mathematical formula for the percentage of physical and mental abilities that major league ballplayers have, and need to have, to function at various high levels of play. It’s an attempt to re-calibrate the formula of a certain wise and gnomic yogi, much-quoted in my youth, who once calculated that fully half of " baseball" is 90% mental.

This re-calculation places two-thirds of "baseball" as physical, and one-third as mental. "Mental" is not strictly intellectual or cognitive—it’s more like "non-physical," and may include categories like "instinct," "training," "observation," "experience," and the like. For convenience’s sake, let’s say the ideal baseball player would win every game he plays, and further say that this 1.000 winning percentage is .667 physical and .333 mental.

What this proportion (of admittedly arbitrary percentages) means, first off, is that a baseball genius with marginal MLB physical abilities could have a successful, if not spectacular, big-league career: someone whose mental grasp on the game is exceptional (above .250) could play MLB even if his physical abilities are below average (for symmetry’s sake, say also about .250).  And secondly that you or I could never play major league baseball (which the more mature among us have long since accepted—I fully intend to embrace this idea sometime in my late 60s or early 70s) because most of our contributions will come from the .333% portion, which is never going to be sufficient in itself to fool anyone to think that we belong on a major league roster. Maybe I’d get a few percentage points on the physical scale from my ability to walk or stand up straight, but it would be very few points, elevating me above only the physically handicapped or people in a coma. If I’m relying on my mental abilities to play MLB, well, there aren’t enough of those to get me to Step One.  Depending on the .333% part without significant contributions from the .667 part just doesn’t cut it, doesn’t even come close.

And I don’t have anything like .333% to begin with.  A smart, aware, thoughtful amateur outside of MLB, like all of us here, stands at maybe a few mental points. I will boast, for me and for all of you, that we’ve probably got twice or three times the mental abilities of our wives or girlfriends or kids or co-workers, assuming none of them follow baseball, but that just gets us up to .030 or .060 in the mental categories. (Not in the Ed Grimley sense—in Grimley’s connotation of "mental," I’m sure I rate very high.) Your average white, suburbanite slob is never going to rate any higher than .080 in his baseball smarts, and that’s cutting him a lot of slack. That’s about where I peg your typical high school baseball player; a good college player, with decent coaching, maybe gets up to .100. The best of the best college players enter the minor leagues at .120, and the smartest AAA player in the game today is maybe at .150 mentally, with most minor-leaguers being in .100-.150 range, mentally.

Physically, of course, that’s a whole nother story. Young players, in college or shortly thereafter, are close to their physical peaks. If .667 is the maximum conceivable physical measure, then some players are at .300 or .350 before they ever play an MLB inning. A kid who’s extremely smart who’s also close to his physical peak at 18 or 19 (each of which is extremely rare, and the combination practically unheard of), then he’s ready to play in the .500 range right out of high school. Much more typically, a minor league star is around .400-.450, and represents some marginal ability to play immediately in the big leagues.

Fortunately, though, playing in the big leagues at a very young age is the perfect learning environment for such players and they sometimes improve rapidly in it, both physically and mentally. Still growing in both senses, a .400-.450 kid, placed on a MLB roster, can shoot right past .500 in a few months.

(Side note here: I was a lunatic Mets fan in the early 1980s, and I remember the barely 21-year-old Darryl Strawberry being called up in mid-May of 1983 and excelling from the very start. And you know what? I remember wrong. The Mets were still terrible, Straw was hyped, we were all excited to hear about his fast progress through the minor league system, and were thrilled to see him break through to Rookie-of-the-Year status despite the late callup, but I totally forgot that he sucked eggs for his first month: in his first 34 big league games, Strawberry batted .179 with no power and very little OBP,  47 strikeouts in 123 ABs. People rave about Al Kaline coming up straight out of high school at age 18, but in his first 25 games, do you know how he did? .154 BA, .368 OPS.  Mays, you all know about for his first month at age 20. 18-year-old Robin Yount?  First 21 games .176 BA, .444 OPS.  This is all anecdotal, but the youngest stars often struggle adjusting to big-league pitching. They adjust fast, and they learn a lot of things in very brief periods of time, but even world-class talent can’t outweigh the disadvantages of extreme youth and inexperience, no matter how favorably we might remember Strawberry’s or Kaline’s or Mays’ or Yount’s first big-league games in retrospect.)

The principle I’ve been working under, for as far back as I can remember, explains Bill’s thesis of most players’ peaks coming in their late 20s. In its simplest form, this principle says that players arrive in the big league at, or close to, their physical peaks. They might improve their physical abilities, especially if they debut at a very tender age, and that peak might plateau for a few years, but by a player’s mid-20s, his physical decline has already begun. In catastrophic circumstances, it will decline precipitiously, but typically, the physical decline is gradual: a player who debuts at a .400 physical measure (out of .667) may get it up as high as .450 before the decline begins, and then he will drop (irregularly, mostly dependent on injuries) increasingly for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, the mental-processes line is rising, and steeply. He may add to his knowledge, probably he does, for as long as he plays in the big leagues, but most of his mental progress will come in his first few years, and most of that will come in his first year, and most of that will come in the first half of his first year.  The mental processes will eventually look like a plateau, though it will have a slight upward grade to it as it approaches the maximum of .333.

So the overall peak, mental and physical combined, will come early on. Here’s what a typical star career might look like, broken down into mental and physical components:

Of course, no one’s career would actually proceed so uniformly or predictably—injuries, luck, usage, etc. would introduce randomizing elements, but what I’m trying to illustrate is how I’ve broken down into imaginary percentage figures the factors that go into a player peaking around age 27.

I think I came up with this breakdown years before I even read Bill James’ theory, though I probably placed the peak years incorrectly, in the players’ early thirties, before reading his (at the time, radical and iconoclastic) evidence of a much earlier peak than anyone had thought. It’s just an arithmetical way of expressing the concept of "Your mind continues to grow as your body deteriorates" but very specifically related to baseball players’s careers, about which I need to think much less than I do.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff my whole life, and I assume everyone else shares my assumptions , though I realize that maybe some BJOL readers may find this assumption unreasonable or even crazy. Let me know if any part of this breakdown seems strange to you, or objectionable, or just flat-out wrong, and thanks as ever for reading.