Working through another chapter of my baseball data book I came across functions designed to model a player’s potential career trajectory and figure out comparisons between other players. A lot of baseball theory expects a player to really hit their peak around their age-27 or age-28 season. To model the projections, I use a player’s Age on the x-axis and the player’s OPS on the y-axis. The example in the book used Mickey Mantle to show how it works but this started getting me thinking about more modern players into today’s game. So, I looked at a few. Being a Cubs fan, I looked at Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo. But I also looked at Mike Trout, arguably one of the best baseball players, certainly in the modern era, if not the history of the game.
There’s a few recognizable names on Kris Bryant’s player comparison graphs, namely Yasiel Puig, but he’s not currently in the league. Projecting past the age of 30, the players that it looks like Bryant compares the most to are Leon Durham and John Jaha, both of whom saw significant declines after their peak OPS. Rizzo’s comparison to Jason Bay is certainly alarming but the Adam Lind graph shows a slight uptick in OPS after the age-31 season. Trout’s OPS has leveled off a bit recently (he’s dealt with several injuries) but he’s still a high level player who still hasn’t hit his age-30 season. Once he’s fully healthy, I think we’ll see him continue playing at a high level.
