How Old Are Those Dominicans?

Here’s an article from Baseball America, baseball’s minor league bible, about how another young Dominican is not quite so young as he led his signing team to believe.  Indians’ shortstop prospect 17 year old Jose Osoria is really 20 year old Wally Bryan.

Currently 70 players are under investigation for lying about their ages to get big bonuses.  The teams are left in a real bind, because they’ve invested money in the young liar, and even after the true age is revealed, the player is usually still a legitimate prospect, if not as good a one as the team thought when they signed him.  MLB recently handed out a one-year suspension to a 3Bman formerly known as Jefri Pena, who turned out to be four years older than he claimed.

Teams have known for at least a hundred years that ball players get old in a hurry, and the younger a player is when he establishes himself as a major league regular, the longer his career is likely to last and the higher his peak performance.  It’s up there with recognition of the platoon advantage (in the vast majority of cases, left-handed hitters hit right-handed pitchers better than left-handed pitchers, and vice versa) in terms of how long this fact has been conventional wisdom within baseball.

Needless to say, young players in poor foreign countries where record keeping is not up to first world standards have also known this fact for a long time.  Given the amount of money at stake, the incentive to lie about one’s age is enormous.

9/11 really brought a lot of this out into the open, when the U.S. began to examine much more closely who was entering the country and whether or not they were who they said they were.  Recent stars caught lying about their ages include Pedro Feliz, Miguel Tejada and Vladimir Guerrero.  Each was a major league player by the time he was caught, and in the case of Tejada and Guerrero, both were already big stars.

In Vladimir Guerrero’s case, I knew immediately upon hearing the reports that he was a year older than everyone thought, that the report was true.  Guerrero’s career progression had always appeared to me be very strange.  Under the old age, he would have had the best year of his career in terms of OPS at age 24 (2000), which is extremely unusual for player who hasn’t had his career prematurely diminished by injury or war-time service.  He also seemed to be getting old awfully fast in terms of dropping off from his peak level of performance.  Adding the extra year to his age made his career progression much closer to what you would expect, based on the norms established by generations of great ballplayers.

Of course, until you know for sure, it’s hard to speculate.  Every player is unique in a sense, so any one player could easily deviate from the norm.

A case in point is Raul Ibanez.  He’s having his best year at age 37, which naturally made a lot of people wonder if he is using PED’s.  However, since there is no real information to suggest he using PED’s, he’s got to get the benefit of the doubt, because he could be having the best year of his career for a number of other reasons.

I note, however, that Ibanez is currently on the DL with a groin strain.  One of the reasons 37 year olds so rarely have peak seasons is that they just can’t stay healthy like guys age 26 to 31.  Also, when the old guys get hurt, it generally takes longer for them to heal, and often when they come back, they’re still hurting, and their numbers drop.  It will be interesting to see what Ibanez does when he comes off the DL in the next few days.  Don’t be surprised if he cools off big-time in the second half.