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April 9, 2008, 03:18 PM ET
Hitters and Pitchers peaks

by Clay Davenport

Kevin had a question in his chat today:
> mtmeyers6 (1:04:52 PM): anyway, I feel like BP did a study a few years ago
> about pitchers peaks, and how they peak earlier than hitters. do you have
> any recollection of this? I searched the site, but couldn’t find what I was
> looking for.

I’m not sure what mtmeyers6 was looking for, but I ran a quick and dirty study, looking at

a) players who peaked (had their single best WARP3 season; ties go to the youngest) since 1947, and

b) had at least a 2.0 WARP3 in that season

The results:

P H
Average 27.06 27.21

Median 27 27

Mode 26 26

SD 3.42 2.91

There were nearly equal numbers of Pitchers (2061) and Hitters (2106) in the study, and the distributions are fairly equal. Both hitters and pitchers were most likely to peak at age 26 or 27. The pitcher’s chart is noticeably wider (the higher standard deviation). As a result, pitchers were more than twice as likely to peak at age 22 or younger than hitters (139 pitchers to 66 hitters), and were also about twice as likely to peak at 34 or older (95 to 51).

The histogram:

Age Hitters Pitchers

The >43 pitcher is Satchel Paige, the 43-year-old pitcher is Diomedes Olivo, the 41-yo hitter was Bob Boone, and the 19-yo pitcher was Gary Nolan, to address the singleton outliers.

The results are similar with other WARP3 cutoffs.

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