by Lincoln Mitchell
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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack.
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Throughout baseball history, the very best players have excelled well into their thirties. The five players who have produced the most WAR from the age of 31 through the end of their careers are Barry Bonds, Honus Wagner, Willie Mays, Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron. Those might be the five greatest players in AL/NL history. Ted Williams narrowly misses that list, but would be in that group as well had he not missed two seasons in his thirties while serving in Korea.
If we exclude Bonds, who had late career surge due to PED use, then the most recent player on that list is Henry Aaron who retired in following the 1976 season. Mike Schmidt and Joe Morgan, whose careers lasted well after Aaron retired are among the top 20 as well. However, the only players with 40 or more WAR after age 31 who played primarily in this century are Adrian Beltre and Chipper Jones.
Some of the greatest players of the last three decades or so have been unproductive after age 31. Albert Pujols produced only 20.3 WAR in the 12 yeas after he turned 31. The final season in which Pujols was both healthy and productive was in 2014 when at age 34 he slashed .272/.324/.455 for 3.2 WAR. Miguel Cabrera remained a very good player through his age 33 season, but in the seven years since then has accumulated -2.6 WAR. Ken Griffey Jr. had his last great season at age 30. He played another ten years and never had another four WAR season. Willie Mays, by contrast, had four 10 WAR seasons from ages 31-34.
There have been 609 5 WAR or more seasons by players 31 or older since 1900. Sixty-six of those seasons have occurred since 2000, but fully 19 of those were by players like Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa and Robinson Cano who were widely understood to be PED users. A more stark number is that there have been 67 times when a player 31 or older had an eight WAR season. Excluding known steroid users, only Joey Votto in 2017 did that during this century. During the 1960s and 1970s, this was done a total of 18 times.
It is not difficult to figure out why it is less common for older players to have great seasons now. Better pitching, bullpens and athleticism has meant that the game is more difficult particularly for older hitters. In previous eras a superior player who was slowing down could compensate through the benefits of the experience, but that is much less helpful when facing a seemingly endless stream of young pitchers throwing in the high 90s with excellent secondary pitches.
The current player about whom this raises the most question is Mike Trout. From 2012-2020, Trout was the best player in the game. His teammate Shohei Ohtani has eclipsed him in that measure. Trout is still a very good player. From 2021 through the present, he has an OPS+ of 162, one of the best in baseball. However, the longtime Angels star, who turned 30 in August of 1991, has struggled to remain healthy playing in only 237 games since the beginning of the 2021 season. The question regarding Trout is whether he will ever be both good and healthy at the same time again. If he is, then Trout will solidify his position among the inner circle of all-time greats. If not, Trout will end up with a career that looks much more like that of Ken Griffey Jr. than that of Willie Mays or Henry Aaron.
The table below shows how four sluggers fared through age thirty and then from age 31 through the end of their careers. Mike Trout is on the last line. There are the usual caveats here. For Aaron and Mays, Negro League statistics are not included; Mays’s early years would have been even better had he not missed almost two full years serving in the military; and the three more recent players all had partial seasons in 2020 due to the pandemic. Nonetheless, a few things are very clear from this table. First, Aaron, and particularly Mays, were spectacular older players. One measure of this is that Mays accumulated as much or more WAR after turning 31 as Tony Gwynn, Eddie Murray and Ernie Banks did over their entire careers.
The contrast between Mays and Aaron and the more recent players is hard to miss. Ken Griffey Jr. was essentially a league average player for about a decade in his 30s. Albert Pujols was slightly better, but mostly because of good seasons in his very early 30s. The same is true of Cabrera. Trout remains an open book. If he can sustain the level of performance even of the last couple of years and be relatively healthy, he will be much better than average for an older player of his generation.
This is kind of an interesting statistical finding that is consistent with what we know about the changes in the game particularly around the quality of pitching. However, the meaning goes that. Great players who have long careers are critical parts of the fabric of what makes baseball both a fun game to follow as well as an important institution.
It is significant that Willie Mays played in his first World Series in 1951 as a star rookie for the New York Giants and 20 years later had a great season that carried the San Francisco Giants into the playoffs. It is similarly significant that as a young player in 1957 and 1958 Henry Aaron led the Milwaukee Braves to National League pennants, and almost 20 years later in the same city, albeit with a new team, he was still slugging home runs. Pujols and Cabrera have also had very long careers but by the end they were really just chasing milestones.
