Is 33 the Magic Number
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 in Uncategorized |
A poster below draws my attention to this Sports Illustrated blog post, which argues that David Ortiz and A-Rod are both having off years because they’ve turned 33, and, well, baseball players start to suck when they turn 33?
I’m not convinced….
3 Responses
7/2/2009 4:15 pm
I’m the one who posted the link, so I may have a bit invested in defending the article, but it does have an argument along with some evidence, despite what your rhetorical question implies. A list of 30 baseball stars — including a lot of Hall of Famers — who have fallen off a cliff between 32 and 33 is pretty interesting. And Bill James is probably the most respected baseball statistician on the planet (though, yes, he *is* currently a Red Sox employee), if you’ll allow an appeal to authority to persuade you to take the piece a bit more seriously.
7/2/2009 4:24 pm
I don’t mean to dismiss the idea, but I thought the argument was uninspiring–so he picked 30 players. So what? I could find many who didn’t suffer such a drop-off. And most of the players he cited were from a different era in baseball.
Also, one of them, Jason Giambi, had steroid issues….
7/2/2009 4:59 pm
My point was only to cast doubt on your repeated assertions that steroids use is the best or only explanation for Ortiz’s performance this year. Many great players have had dramatic drop offs, including many that didn’t use steroids. That’s all.