One of my favorite Twitter exchanges of the week came when Jon Heyman reported on a recent transaction:
The Age Of Ignorance
An important question: Which player in Major League Baseball surprises you the most when you remember how old he is?
mike macdougal will report to #cubs triple-a iowa team. hard thrower. one day he’ll realize potentialTo which the response came:
...he’s 35.Whoops! But you can’t blame Heyman. There are 750 players currently on a major-league roster, another hundred or two who are constantly being shuttled back and fourth, and the prospects -- always the prospects. There are too many damned players in baseball to keep track of. You’re going to stick a label on a player and forget about that player long past the point where the label is applicable.
Dan Haren will always be a hard-throwin' ace to me, yet his average fastball velocity this year has been lower than Joe Saunders' and Kyle Lohse's. So confusing. I will never remember that Wade Davis and Gavin Floyd are right-handers, even as I'm watching them pitch. Their parents shouldn't have given them such left-handed names!
And to Heyman, Mike MacDougal will forever be the hard-throwing, raw prospect of yore, forever tantalizing pitching coaches, even if he's closer in age to Jamie Moyer than he is to Madison Bumgarner.
This brings us to a question that drives to the very heart of sabermetrics. This is serious stuff, people.
Which current player is the current titleholder in “Holy, crap. I had no idea he was so old”?
The inverse question isn't a lot of fun because the answer is always Miguel Cabrera, who just turned 29 a couple weeks ago. He was born in the same year as Brett Gardner and David Freese. Every time I notice Cabrera's age, it stuns me. I had to fact-check this paragraph six times.
But the “Holy, crap. I had no idea he was so old” player is an open debate. A list of contenders:
Jamey Carroll (38)
Late-blooming utility infielders are always a good bet, and Carroll didn't get his first steady utility job until he was 29. He's older than Roger Cedeno, Junior Spivey, and Derek Jeter.
Raul Ibañez (40)
Ah, Ibañez, the post-nuclear cockroach of the outfield, and I mean that with as much respect as possible. There have been 200 baseball players born in 1972 to make the major leagues. Five are still active: Chipper Jones, Andy Pettitte, Jason Isringhausen, Manny Ramirez, and Raul Ibanez. Some names from that year who are long gone: Jermaine Allensworth, Kevin Orie, and Benji Gil. Homer Bush, Deivi Cruz, and Joe McEwing. Omar Daal, Darren Dreifort, and Steve Karsay. You haven't thought about any of them for five years.
Ibañez outlasted them all. For the purposes of the HCIHNIHWSO awards, it helps that he didn’t have his first good season until he was 29.
Matt Thornton (35)
Thornton is the lefty complement to MacDougal up there, and he'll always be a young lefty to me, even if he's pitched for nine seasons. That sounds like a lot, but as this guy points out, we've been watching Felix Hernandez for eight seasons already.
Luke Hochevar (28)
"Old" is a relative term. You don't have to be pushing 40 to land on this list. Hochevar was the first overall pick of the 2006 draft, and he's been about to break out for the Royals for six years running. "Break out" is also a relative term. I liked this paragraph from MLB.com:
Big innings have been the largest thorn in the side of Hochevar, who’s 3-4 with a 7.02 ERA this year. His numbers in the first inning are even more unsightly; his first-inning ERA is 13.50. In the third, it’s 11.05. The middle innings haven’t been a problem for Hochevar, but if he gets to the seventh, look out. His ERA in that frame is 27.00.
Other than him being bad throughout your standard baseball game, he's cool. And he's already 28. He'll turn 29 before the season is over. He's as old as Edwin Jackson, who has already been with seven teams and appeared in 210 games. But one of these days, man, one of these days. Hochevar will harness his stuff and bust out. You'll see.
Max Scherzer, 27, almost falls into this category. But he still has a year on Hochevar, who I'm going with as my winner. Every time I pull up that ol' Baseball Reference page, I can't believe that Hochevar is almost 30. He's still a young prospect, trying to figure it out, and never getting older, like Kirsten Dunst in Interview With The Vampire, but with more sucking.
But I’m not going to pretend this is an exhaustive list. Your suggestions, if you would.
See More:
