Jose Bautista and Defying the Curve
So Jose Bautista will not receive the six years or $150 million he was reportedly seeking a year ago. According to Ken Rosenthal, Bautista has reportedly reached an agreement on a one-year deal with a mutual option to return to Toronto. Nick Stellini has already addressed some of the implications of the deal for the Blue Jays.
Since the conclusion of the PED era, baseball appears to have returned closer to its roots. Baseball appears to be a young man’s game again. Teams are hesitant to pay for seasons in players’ 30s. Teams prize prospects and pre-arbitration seasons more than ever. Teams are well aware of age curves, and aging models suggest Bautista is probably not the next David Ortiz, as Craig Edwards wrote back in November.
Those factors — plus a down season impacted by injury, plus a market that might have overcorrected against bat-only players — all conspired to limit Bautista’s market. The FanGraphs crowd projected Bautista would sign a three-year, $65 million deal.
But was the industry too skeptical of Bautista’s future this winter? Are the Blue Jays on cusp of a landing Bautista on another bargain of a contract?
For starters, the depth of Bautista’s 2016 decline was exaggerated. While Bautista has declined defensively, while those skills are probably not returning, Bautista’s 16.8% walk rate was the second best of his career. He still has elite discipline. And he still made plenty of quality contact in 2016:
Bautista pic.twitter.com/3fFKIqQhwe
— Tangotiger (@tangotiger) January 16, 2017
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Most interesting to me is that athletes like Bautista believe aging models may not apply to 21st-century athletes.
We are on the cusp of a weekend in the NFL when the Pittsburgh Steelers’ best defender, 38-year-old James Harrison, will be targeting perhaps the best player in the league, in the 39-year-old Tom Brady. Both are reportedly maniacal and on the cutting edge with regard to fitness and nutrition. So is the 36-year-old Bautista.
Are the Bautistas and Bradys going to have us rethinking and rewriting aging curves?
Because of the advances in training, medicine and technology, Pirates head athletic trainer Todd Tomczyk – who was previously a part of innovative strength and training staffs while with the Dodgers and Indians – said in October that he suspects our aging curves are in danger of becoming outdated.
“I think we are rewriting (age curves),” Tomczyk said. “I don’t think we fully understand the 21st-century athlete. That’s why we are emphasizing recovery. It’s why we are collecting as much data as we possibly can on how their bodies are responding to help them perform day-in and day-out.”
There are number of teams – and athletes – that believe player efficiency and career length can be enhanced through rest, recovery, nutrition and training.
Bautista is among the most devout believers.
Bautista and San Francisco Giants reliever Mark Melancon are among a growing number of athletes interested in blood testing and analytics according to Fox Sports.
In a fascinating interview with Bautista from last spring, Peter Gammons reports that Bautista’s winter routine includes a 5 a.m. daily wakeup call with “flexibility, eyesight work, nutrition, yoga and complex weight work.”
Said Bautista last March:
“I am preparing to be physically capable of doing the same,” Bautista says. “I am preparing to defy those aging curves by my strict adherence to physical, mental and nutritional routines. When I missed time (at 31) with hip problems, I changed everything,” he says. “I studied, I learned about my body, and how to keep it at peak performance levels, and how to maintain it. I study how Chip Kelly prepares his players. I do what he teaches. I do what Tom Brady does. It is about discipline and diet and strive for physical and mental states that defy aging. I love a good steak; I cannot eat red meat. There are a lot of things I love, but I cannot be who and what I want to be and eat and drink them.
“It has been suggested that when I told the Blue Jays what it would take for me to sign an extension and pass up free agency (next November), it was because I absolutely believe that I will perform at my expected level past the age of 40.”
While no one can defy time forever, the idea of 21st-century athletes extending peaks and careers – through legal means – is fascinating.
Of course, athletes raised in the modern culture of sports specialization perhaps have been adversely impacted in areas like pitchers throwing year round, which could be a factor in the Tommy John surgery spike.
While it’s still early to know much about the 21st-century athlete, are there any signs that age curves might be changing?
FanGraphs’ Jonah Pemstein helped me compare aging trends across two periods. The first period, 1991-2003, accounts for the years leading up to PED testing. That interval is believed to have warped aging models and to have represented the peak of the PED era.
We know that players in their 30s, today, account for less playing time and value than they did in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But Pemstein found that, since PED testing began, players aged 30 and older account for a greater share of WAR in the period of 2004-16 as compared to 1960-90.
| PlayerType | Era | WAR Age 30+ players | Total WAR | WAR30+pct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Batters | 1960-1990 | 4439.5 | 13654.2 | 32.5 |
| Batters | 2004-2016 | 2630.1 | 7408.4 | 35.5 |
| Pitchers | 1960-1990 | 3178.3 | 10287.1 | 30.9 |
| Pitchers | 2004-2016 | 1752.6 | 5588.4 | 31.4 |
While players aged 30 and older are producing more overall value today as compared to that same group from 1960 to -90, hitters nevertheless appear to face slightly steeper aging curves where wOBA is concerned:
Across generations hitters with strong plate discipline skills, like Bautista, are better bets to age well.
Consider walk rates for each era studied:
While overall production for hitters is declining more steeply once players reach their mid 30s, some skills – like strikeout rate relative to era – are aging more gracefully.
It will be interesting to see if modern strength and training, combined with wearable technologies, bend aging curves. If players begin to age more gracefully, it will perhaps change the way some teams view roster construction. If players like Bautista begin to beat the curve consistently, there will be more lucrative free-agent seasons for players, and owners’ share of revenue – which has been increasing for 20 years – will perhaps decline.
I think most were skeptical Bautista would become an every day player earlier in his career. I think most were skeptical Bautista could repeat his 2010 breakout. I think many were skeptical about the Blue Jays giving Bautista a five-year deal after his 2010 breakout.
Maybe betting against Bautista will be another losing position, or maybe age curves are more natural law than they are malleable. But if players like Bautista are right, then we will have to toss out much of what we know about age and performance.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
Great post
/batflip
Travis: any thoughts on MGL’s recent revisit of aging curve methodology?:
https://mglbaseball.com/2016/12/21/a-new-method-of-constructing-more-accurate-aging-curves
The survivorship bias is interesting. I certainly don’t have a perfect model. I’m not sure anyone does. But as I wrote in the post, I’m really interested to see how the aging models hold up over the coming years
Probably worth pointing out that the aging curves don’t include older players whose skills have deteriorated to the point where they can’t find a roster spot. Or maybe I’m mistaken…
PS: Another great post.
Aging curves also don’t include younger players whose skills are too unrefined to the point where they can’t find a roster spot.
That’s the survivorship bias and they attempt to account for it
I believe jb has some production in him left but im less confident in his health. He always was a bit injury prone and that doesnt get better with age.
So I would not be surprised if he posted a mid 130s ops+ but only like 110 games played the next two years.
Really good post. One thing (for us older fans) that is a big difference is just how much surgical and medical techniques other than TJ have improved over the last few decades. Laparoscopic surgery adds precision, reduces trauma, shortens recovery time, and causes less permanent damage than previous procedures. I’m sure diet, nutrition, and work-out habits help. In the past, few pitchers lifted or did strength training–it was thought to impair flexibility–but now there is recognition that injury frequency can be related to fatigue and over-use. I’d throw in another point–multi-year contracts that give the player security to seek out care because he knows he’s not going to be Wally Pip, and also encourage team management not to abuse a valuable asset because there’s still so much money due.
I like the post and how you looked at things. I think the extreme ends of the aging curves are prone to misinterpretation and noise. (Also – 2000-2016 or 2004-2016? different labels in the graphs).
The wOBA aging curve would be better lined up at 24-28 rather than starting from 20 – where there is significant variation between eras. If you shift the 2004-2016 curve vertically, it lines up with the 1960-1990 curve almost perfectly for 23-38.
The best way to defy the aging curve is to just start a second one.
He spends 95% of his on field time stretching. He should be nice and limber.
This is a really interesting article, so it pains me to say this, but Tango’s graphic is my favourite part. I want one for all players, is that possible?
I am sure this has been addressed before, but are people certain that there is a direct correlation between pitcher use, and Tommy John? I was in told that in Asia they believe that the opposite might be the case.
I just started playing rec league basketball again a few months ago, and the first time I played I was so sore the next day I called in sick from work… now the next day I feel fine. Is there concrete evidence that the elbow is the part of the body that does not get stronger with use? I picture some of the pitchers who used to routinely throw 120+ pitches and using my large sample size of a few HOF pitchers I feel as if maybe that helped them?
There will always be outliers, and Bautista might be one. But if the value/aging curve is changing for batters, I sure don’t see it for Bautista’s age group in the last couple of years.
— Age 35, 2014 and ’15: 29 position players totaled 35.5 bWAR … 11 scored at least 1.0 WAR … 9 at least 2.0 … 9 at least 3.0
— Age 36, 2015 and ’16: 16 players totaled 3.3 bWAR (down over 90%) … 3 scored at least 1.0 WAR … 1 at least 2.0 … 1 at least 3.0.
Interesting article, and I do think that nutrition and training might be able to help players delay the cliff-falling decline to some extent. But when I look at Bautista’s player page, I just don’t see it.
You mentioned his walk rate, but that’s about the only thing that improved. His K% was the highest it’s been since he established himself in 2010. His ISO was the lower it’s been, and his wRC+ has steadily declined over the last couple years. He might be exercising and avoiding red meat, but his production has been declining.
Maybe he’ll turn that around this year, but as of now it’s in the “best shape of my life” category where I need to see it to believe it.