More Aging

In an effort take baseball fans minds off of the Jeter/A-Rod soap opera, today in my column on BP I start wrapping up a series of off seson ramblings by further exploring the relationship between team age and performance in response to some excellent reader questions.

In epitome, the three-year trend in team age has some (but not very much) predictive power in terms of record, team age and payroll are more highly correlated in the free agent era, and when we apply the standard individual performance curve to teams what you find is that there is really very little correlation between the two because of the fact that older players who remain in the league are actually better than younger ones. And I even throw in an analogy from Charles Darwin and apply it to baseball...