Let’s Stop Burying The Living

As you may have noticed, two new writers joined the site today. Erik Manning shocked everyone by writing about a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, while Dave Allen tackled the fly ball depth of David Ortiz. We’re all thrilled to have these two on board, and while I’m just a dude who writes here, I’m pretty proud of what the site has become. These two just keep adding to the awesomeness that is FanGraphs. Even if David fired me tomorrow, I’d still be a fan.

Anyway, I didn’t mention those two articles just to suck up to the new guys. Instead, I wanted to build off of Other Dave’s topic about Ortiz. During his disastrous run in April and May, you could walk around any city in America and run into someone proclaiming that David Ortiz was washed up. The bat speed was gone. He was off the juice. His weight caught up with him. He lied about his age. The theories were almost as numerous as the people spouting them, but the conclusion was all the same – Ortiz was finished.

Of course, he wasn’t actually finished. He was just about to start hitting like the David Ortiz of old, in fact (he’s at .308/.400/.654 in June, by the way). Despite what everyone saw, said, and agreed upon, Ortiz was on the verge of a big performance spike.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Last year, I was one of many who wrote off Carlos Delgado when he started the year hitting like a middle infielder. Right after we all declared him too old to play, he started hitting like an MVP candidate again. The Tigers cut Gary Sheffield because he looked done in spring training, and he’s been one of the Mets best hitters this year. Jason Giambi hit .208/.342/.379 in 2004, then led the American League in on base percentage in 2005. Scott Spiezio was released by the Mariners in 2005 because he was 3 for 47 and looked as bad as anyone ever has, then proceeded to post an .862 OPS for the Cardinals in 2006.

We could go on and on. The list of guys who have been written off as over the hill and then shoved that right back in everyone’s face is long and distinguished. You would think that eventually, we’d learn our lesson. There may be a point at which a major league player just loses enough of his ability to stop being productive, but we suck at figuring out when that point is. We’re so bad at it that we should just stop trying.

We haven’t figured out what numbers show that a player is truly washed up. We haven’t figured out what it looks like when that happens. We haven’t figured out how to combine scouting and statistical analysis to give us a warning before a player heads off the cliff. All we’ve figured out is how to guess wrong a lot. Young player struggle, old players struggle, middle age players struggle, and we don’t have any good way of figuring out why in most cases. Just because a player experiences a drop in performance, and is old, does not mean that age related decline is the reason for the performance. More often than not, it’s just bad luck.

Let’s stop pretending that we can identify players who have “just lost it” overnight. Too often, they find it again the next morning.