Youth Movement? Future Contracts? Steroids?

[Prince James]

Is it just me, or does it seem like all of MLB is trending towards what used to be considered very young players? Perhaps it has to do with recent economics and/or teams being smarter, perhaps there was an unusually large influx of very talented young players, or perhaps there is no difference at all. I even read somewhere recently that 25 is becoming the new 27 in MLB, when a player is expected to reach their peak. Might this even be the impact of a much lower rate of steroid usage, not providing some of the benefits that an "older" player may have over a younger one?

 

Nonetheless, I was wondering how this might affect the structure of baseball contracts in the future. Will we continue to see the 3 year league minimum and 3 year abitration structure that exists? Or, will we see a reduction in the amount of time a team controls a player that they brought up from the minors?

 

Any offseason thoughts on this? I love following the young emerging players, as I think most do who come to sites like this. However, I only recently began to wonder if this trend might impact some of the contract rules we are accustomed to in baseball.

[Ennder]

Teams are valuing defense more and more which makes a lot of older players less attractive. Steriods obviously has some sort of an impact on this. Teams are going global more and a lot more international players are coming into the league so the overall player pool is expanding making vets more expendable. The economy has teams wanting to cut payroll a little so they have gone with younger rather than more expensive.

 

I'm sure there are other reasons I'm missing.

[JohnBriggs12]

Prince James,

Take a look at sites like retrosheet and baseball-reference and look at the ages of players back in the 60's and 70's. Teams were much younger in those days. Young pitchers came up at 20 and 21 regularly, not 23-24 like they do today. Many were done by age 30. Journeymen types were lucky to play until they were 32 or 33. Even the stars didn't do much after 35. You wonder why Ron Santo isn't in the Hall of Fame? He wasn't productive long enough. He was 32 in his last productive year and out of the game before he turned 35. As great as Eddie Mathews was, his last really productive year came at age 32 also and he was done by 37. Roger Maris never reached 20 HR after turning 30 and was washed up at 33. Mantle was washed up at 36.

I think it's a good sign that teams aren't overspending for aging players. It means that the supply of young talent is finally catching up after it was decimated by the combination of expansion and youth baseball losing kids to soccer and other sports. And since young players are cheaper, it means teams can afford to pay the truly great players and not lose anything by surrounding them with young guys instead of overpriced veterans on the downside.

[jerichoholicninja]

I'd guess it started out that teams were afraid older players wouldn't be good anymore because of lack of steroids but it has now moved into a necessity because of the economy. Young players are cheap and every team except the Yankees has focused more attention on them.

[TooLiveBrew]

The Yankees have. Hughes, Chamberlain, Gardner, Robertson, & even though he's still a year or so away, Jesus Montero.

[logan82]

The only real difference with the Yankees is that they have been able to retain their franchise guys while signing a couple of those guys from other teams.

[monty57]

I don't know how much effect this has, but I'm 38, and when I was growing up, everyone played multiple sports. When one season was over, it was forgotten until the next year. I have friends whose kids are 15-20, and they've basically "specialized" in one sport since they were 7 or 8 years old, working on that one sport twelve months a year. Theoretically, that could lead to players being better at that sport, and "MLB ready" at an earlier age.

 

Also, economically I think many teams are realizing that a 22-year-old who is probably never going to be a starter can be just as good as a 35-year-old waning former starter for about 10-20% of the price. And, you're seeing some players like Damon that got a big contract during the peak years and now fail to realize that the market has changed. Finally, there's no doubt in my mind that steroids allowed a lot of players to continue playing much longer than they would have naturally.