Outliers, Birth Dates and Baseball
With 2009 shaping up to be the busiest year ever (at least for me), JonahKeri.com will be soliciting high-quality guest posts on a variety of topics. If you’ve got a great post in mind, be it about sports, politics, food, pop culture or anything else, feel free to email me at jonahkeri@gmail.com to discuss.
Today, I present the first guest post in the history of the blog, by Erik Hahmann of the excellent Tampa Bay Rays blog DRaysBay. I’ll let Erik take it from here.
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To steal a line from Digital Underground, just let me introduce myself, my name is… Erik Hahmann, and some (maybe two) of you may be familiar with my work at the Rays blogs OutsPerSwing (now defunct) and DRaysBay. I’m 22, live in St. Petersburg, Florida, and when not crying over the latest Bucs collapse, enjoy watching David Price take over the world one strikeout at a time.
Last week I wrote about Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, specifically about the age cut-off date for youth hockey leagues in Canada and youth baseball leagues in America and how that ties to Major League Baseball, and the Rays.
Just to give a brief recap, the book showed that if you wanted your child to have the best shot at being a very good hockey player, the optimal month of birth was January because the age cut-off date for youth hockey leagues is January 1.
The same idea applies for baseball. The age cut-off date for youth baseball leagues in America is July 31. Not surprisingly then, there are more major league players born in August than in any other month. Last season the Rays had seven players on their 40-man roster born in August. They also happened to be one of the best teams in baseball. That got me to thinking: Does having more August-born players have a direct correlation to team success?
I looked at every team from the 2008 season, and then every playoff team from the last five years to test this theory.
First, the 2008 American League. The three division winners (White Sox(8), Rays(7), Angels(6) ) finished first, second and third in most August-born players. The Wild Card-winning Red Sox came in tied for fifth. Even the AL Cy Young and MVP winners were born in August.
While those examples seem to support the question I raised above, I’m afraid this may be a statistical anomaly, an outlier if you will.
Looking at the 2008 National League season yields some intriguing results too, though with less supporting evidence than offered in the AL.
The NL West-winning Dodgers finished first in the league with six August-born players. Five teams (Phillies, Brewers, Cardinals, Pirates, D-Backs) then finished tied for second with four players apiece.
The Phillies finished first in the East in both the standings and August-born players. In the Central, the Brewers won 90 games and claimed the NL Wild Card. The Cardinals rolled up a solid 86-76 record, while the Pirates went just 67-96. Both teams finished well behind the division-winning Cubs, who fielded just three August players on their 40-man roster. The Diamondbacks finished just two games out of the NL West lead, but barely above .500 at 82-80.
Let’s look at the playoff teams from the past five seasons. Since I’ve already listed the 2008 playoff teams I’ll start with 2007 (thanks to Ryan Glass of DRaysBay for helping with the data).
2007
Team Players born in August
Red Sox 7
Phillies 7
Cubs 5
Indians 4
Angels 4
D-Backs 4
Yankees 3
Rockies 3
2006
Team Players born in August
Padres 6
Cardinals 5
A’s 5
Yankees 4
Twins 3
Tigers 2
Mets 0
Dodgers 0
2005
Team Players born in August
Astros 6
Cardinals 5
Padres 5
Red Sox 5
White Sox 3
Yankees 2
Angels 2
Braves 0
2004
Team Players born in August
Cards 5
Angels 5
Astros 5
Red Sox 3
Dodgers 3
Yankees 2
Twins 1
Braves 1
2003
Team Players born in August
Red Sox 8
Cubs 6
Twins 5
Marlins 4
Yankees 2
A’s 2
Braves 2
Giants 1
As you can see from the tables, a wide variety of teams made the playoffs. In 2006, two teams with zero August-born players made the postseason. In both 2007 and 2006, a team with the lowest number of August-born players in their league made it to the World Series. In 2004 and 2005, the Braves had 1 and 0 August-born players on the roster respectively, but still won the NL East both times.
There may be a lot more worth exploring, going further back into the past, ranking teams 1 through 30 each year based on the number of August-born players on the roster, and seeing if more of those players dovetailed with teams finding increased success. Based on this preliminary research, though, it looks having a high number of August-born players on the roster is neither a detriment nor a great indicator of team success.
6 January 2009 at 12:12 pm
One of the baseball-related Outliers thoughts I had involved the concept of 10,000 hours to master a craft, and how it related to pitching. I suppose Nolan Ryan could read it and say “Whip those arms into shape!” to prepare young pitchers. But such a physically demanding action probably falls outside the bounds of that concept. It certainly would explain why 18-year-old basketball players can succeed in the NBA now if they’ve been dribbling since leaving the womb.
6 January 2009 at 12:49 pm
That makes sense, Hank, and I think you’re spot on about pitching being an unnatural act, such that those that make it to 10,000 hours are genetic anomalies of sorts. Most pitchers, especially young one, would break down and/or lose effectiveness under that kind of long-term stress.
I’ve got a biog feature I’m working on for ESPN.com that I hope to have done by Opening Day which talks about that topic, through the prism of a famous 1974 game in which Nolan Ryan and Luis Tiant threw something insane like 450 combined pitches. Definitely a big interest of mine, to examine pitching, workloads and ways to beat the odds.