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Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Pushing back time
I dunno, Poz. It seems to me this is confirmation bias.
You look at when a player’s career ends, and then decide that he couldn’t beat father time that year. Well, what about when he did beat father time for all the years leading up to that point? Didn’t Gordie Howe beat father time when at the age of 46 his team won the WHA cup, to finish second in playoff scoring on his team behind his own 19-yr old son (the great and brutally underappreciated Mark Howe)? Even in his last season, Gordie Howe played EVERY GAME just as he was turning 52 years old.
What about the recreation of Carlton Fisk or Paul Molitor? Who would have believed these guys would play as long and as effectively as they did?
The proper way to do this is to look at a particular age, and say: ok, this is where the test will happen. You set up the test without knowing the end result first.
But, no, I don’t believe that a player will simply “fall off”, that he simply gets to a point where he goes from being above average to below replacement in one season. It only looks like that, because old guys are not given a chance to show that the observation just happened to have disproportionately bad luck.
To be sure, an old guy ages much worse and the older he gets the worse he ages. But, it’s not a sudden fall.
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