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Wednesday, March 03, 2010
The historical uniqueness of David Wright’s HR collapse
Eric says:
Looking at the z-score column, the commonality is that his home run total in each season either met or exceeded the average by 0.65 standard deviations. Leafing through the data for players who similarly bopped for the first four years returned 821 spans, but here comes the kicker: When I search for players meeting the aforementioned benchmarks but who fell to -0.60 or more standard deviations below the mean in the fifth season, a grand total of five rows are returned. Five! Over the last 150 years or so, there have literally only been a handful of players to experience a power dropoff from a previously established and high baseline of hitting home runs. The Oceanic Five:
NAME YEARS AGES
Don Baylor 1976-80 27-31
Vinny Castilla 1996-00 28-32
Sam Crawford 1912-16 32-36
Del Ennis 1954-58 29-33
David Wright 2005-09 22-26What initially stands out is Wright was only 26 years old last season while the other cast members were 31 years of age or older. Another fantastically curious factoid is that the other four players barely surpassed the at-bats minimum in that fifth year, ranging from 322-340, while Wright surpassed the 500 mark. Both of these are points in favor of Wright’s anomalous season being about as rare as rare can be in this sport.
Wow.