Age Comparisons

by
January 10, 2006

I've added a feature that allows you to compare up to three players by Age. Age is determined by the season minus the year they were born. All you need to do is go the “compare” section of each player and you'll notice that there's an additional graph right below current season comparison graphs. Just for kicks, I pulled one pitcher age comparison graph and one batter age comparison graph.

Starting with the pitchers, I compared strikeouts per 9 innings (K/9) for Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens, and Randy Johnson. Looks like Pedro has started to decline much earlier in his career than the other two. I'll pass on drawing any conclusions from this graph, but you get the idea.

CK9

For the batters I chose to compare isolated power (ISO) for Derrek Lee, Barry Bonds, and Albert Pujols. Pujols has way more power than Bonds had at the same age while Lee looks like he's finding his power a little later than Bonds did, but he's not far behind.

CISO

Anyway, I think you can see how these comparisons will be useful, maybe even more so than the season comparisons. Enjoy and feel free to send comments and suggestions by posting in the forum or you can fill out a feedback form.

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David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

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biasedgiantsfanatic
19 years ago

Maybe you can help me out. I want to find pitchers to compare Matt Cain with to get a sense for what he has accomplished at age 20. Do you have any suggestion on how I would find such similar comparison players? Baseball-reference.com has an Age 20 leaders board but Cain didn’t really pitch enough to compare to them. And his profile didn’t have a similarity list like most profiles there, so perhaps I’m barking up an empty tree, maybe there is no good comparison. Thanks for anything or nothing. You have a very interesting site! Keep up the good work.

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