Upon further reviews of my last column, I have some corrections and enhancements to make. When the New York Times makes a correction to a big page story, they bury it in tiny print on an inside page. Unlike them, I'll lead off with my corrections front and center. My excuse is that I was pulling stats from my magazines, writing them down, and typing them up. Now I get all my stats from an Excel downloaded spreadsheet. The new way is easier to work and more accurate.
I was trying to get all the 27 year old starting pitchers from last year. I got 19 starting pitchers, there should have been 15 instead. It was supposed to be limited to starting pitchers as of opening day, 2005. These are the guys you would have expected to be starting when you conducted your fantasy draft in March of 2005. Their ages should be as of 4/1/5.
I should have excluded these 5 pitchers. Vogelsong was expected to be a Pit starting pitcher, but never made the rotation. J. Sosa, S. Kim, and J. Seo all moved into the rotation midseason. And Odalis Perez was 26, not 27.
I should have added Eaton to the list. (Maybe it's because he's been injured all this year and I made a mental note not to draft him.) I completely dropped him from my mind. He was 11-5, 4.27, 1.44. with 128.7 IP. He had a pretty good year, but got injured and missed 10 starts.
Anyway here is a new quick and dirty analysis. I was inspired by reading Sports Illustrated touting a youth movement by looking at all the young 15 game winners last year. They said that out of all the 15 game winners, almost half were 27 or less. I checked it out and it is true. Last year out of 23 pitchers winning 15 games, 11 were under 28. (3 of them were 27 - Mulder, Oswalt, and Westbrook.) Now it sounds like these young guns are doing well. However, you need to look at the overall SP population. Out of last year's 150 opening day starting pitchers, 72 of them were 27 or less. (Last year's median aged pitcher was Josh Fogg at 28.) In other words these young guns make up half of the population and half of all 15 game winners. They are not-overperforming. They are performing just as well as should be expected given their ratio to the overall population.
Here is another bigger analysis for all 150 opening day starting pitchers last year. We take all 15 of them at age 27 and compare that with the oldest 15 starting pitchers. If there is any magic at 27, you'd expect them to have a much better performance compared to our group of old men. Let's look at Team 27 by age - (K. WELLS, HUDSON, HALLADAY, WOOD, CHEN, MULDER, MAROTH, OSWALT, ROBERTSON, PADILLA, WESTBROOK, EATON, CHACON, FOSSUM, PATTERSON.) Now let's look at our oldest 10% by age, Team Old - (CLEMENS, MOYER, D. WELLS, JOHNSON, ROGERS, BROWN, HERNANDEZ, LEITER, GLAVINE, MADDUX, WAKEFIELD, W. WILLIAMS, SCHILLING, SMOLTZ, MUSSINA.) Let's look at the average totals from each group to see which is better.
| IP | W | L | ERA | WHIP | K/BB | MS | |
| Oldest | 179 | 12 | 9 | 4.11 | 1.32 | 2.49 | 3.9 |
| 27 | 168 | 11 | 10 | 4.08 | 1.33 | 2.05 | 4.9 |
| Youngest | 145 | 9 | 8 | 4.21 | 1.35 | 2.15 | 8.7 |
You can see here there is little difference between them. The older ones had more wins and a better K/BB ratio, but it was real close. There is no way to claim the 27 year olds performed better. I even snuck in a third group. These were the youngest 15 SPs from last year; (LEDEZMA, WAECHTER, HALSEY, D. CABRERA, PEAVY, C. ZAMBRANO, GOBBLE, OL. PEREZ, HARDEN, J. WILLIAMS, WILLIS, BONDERMAN, ED. JACKSON, GREINKE, KAZMIR). As you can see they didn't perform as well as the other 2 groups.
The last column may be a new statistic for you. The MS stands for Missed starts. As you can see here the older pitchers are missing the fewest starts. This is not what you'd expect from everyone telling you how "injury prone" the older SPs are. The truth is older starters not only make more of their starts, but they pitch longer into games. If you've got Smoltz with a shutout in the 8th, Cox won't be coming to the mound. The younger pitchers are also quicker to be pulled from rotation and sent to minors without having a guaranteed, big money, contract.
Now you can say I should separate between starts missed due to injury and those where a pitcher skips the start. Only to me it is the same thing. If I drafted you I don't care why you are missing a start, only that I am losing out on points. I am not much for excuses, so I'm not big on these uber-young pitchers. Everyone can make excuses for Felix Hernandez struggling by saying he's only 20. Well, he didn't get any younger since you drafted him in the 3rd round. On the other hand when Randy Johnson struggles, they are ready to stuff him in an extra large wheelchair and roll him to a retirement home.
Conclusion:
I could conduct this study next year with 2006 stats and having Lieber and Trachsel replace K.Brown and A. Leiter, but the results should be the same. I don't see the 27 year olds performing any better than the older pitchers. Taking their averages as a group the performances are the same. Now I don't want to be taken wrong. I'm not saying to draft all old pitchers either. I don't like paying much for any starting pitching. Especially at these high prices, I would never draft a SP in the first 5 rounds of a draft. It is much easier to pick up a Hamels, Glavine, Arroyo, or Verlander off waivers post-draft. It is too risky to invest much in any starting pitching.
Instead of making generalizations we should judge these pitchers individually. When someone says you should draft Zito because he's 27, I'd take it with a grain of salt. (Personally, I don't believe Zito can pitch outside of Oakland, so I'd be looking to sell him now before he moves out…but that is a topic for another day.)
