The End Comes Sooner Than Later

If you want to make a special study of 40+ age baseball players the way that some researchers specialize in studying extreme old age, I find there’s really not a lot to work with. I am talking about position players.

I’m not sure why my idea of the upper end of the distribution had it older than it actually is. Do I just not want to accept the unpleasant truth as players try to defy it, falling back on that “age is just a number” trope? Or it that it seems the end cannot come so fast for players who are still playing so well?

In any event, I was interested in getting an idea of the prevalence of 40-and-up players. I wondered if I should go back to maybe the year 2000, or if “the steroid era” would make grouping players in the early 21st century with those who came later negligent.

As I found just 14 batting-title qualifier seasons (for the record, 9 from 2000-2012, 5 from 2013-2025), choosing to start with the year 2000+, it turned out it didn’t much matter.

I also noticed that they topped out at age 41. So I thought a good trivia question would be, “Who is the last 42-year-old to qualify for a batting title?”

Answer: Carlton Fisk, 1990.

And the only other 42-or-older batting average qualifiers (all 42) since the end of World War II are

Pete Rose, 1983

Carl Yastrzemski, 1982

Luke Appling, 1949

That Yastrzemski season got my attention because I wrote about it in connection to Wade Boggs’s 1982, which was his rookie season. I noted that Yaz had made the All-Star team that year, and not on charity, sporting an .855 OPS at the time. But he had a .438 OPS August. And that ended up ruining his season, at least for the statistically focused.

This development now seems less puzzling. It was the other months of Yaz’s at age 42, the great months, that are the real marvel and mystery.

If we open to before 1946, the ranks swell to 33 batting average-qualifying seasons from age-42+ players (when I say before 1946, I mean the 19th century, too).

Twenty are from Negro Leaguers, and a few of the principals went beyond age 42. The batting-average-qualifying seasons reflect

6 seasons from Jud Wilson

3 seasons from Pop Lloyd and Nat Rogers

2 seasons from Newt Allen

1 season from Oscar Charleston, Walter Cannady, Biz Mackey, George Scales and Cool Papa Bell.

What is going on here, that the Negro Leagues are so much more frequently represented than their slice of the pie would predict?

There are many possible explanations.

First, there either weren’t as many Negro League games or not as many that we have record of, the latter meaning that it is possible to show as playing 75% of the games (for instance) when you really didn’t. But that doesn’t explain why, season after season, Wilson rates as a qualifier.

It’s also possible that extremely old Negro League players took more of the barnstorming games off while playing the league games that disproportionately represent the current data for them. They were functionally then, not playing every day, but rested enough to take on an official qualifier load.

This one really doesn’t sound right, though. Sports were unforgiving then, and whether the games counted or not, fans wanted you to play. In the interest of dollars, management wanted what fans wanted. And I doubt there were a bunch of backups who could have given extremely old players days off. But it is interesting this kind of thing was not going on in Major League Baseball, 42-and-older regular players. So there may be some structural difference that leads to the full-looking age-42 seasons in the Negro Leagues while they are absent in Major League Baseball.

The meaning may just be that the Negro Leagues, regardless of the overall high talent level, weren’t as organized as MLB and in a way, then, not as competitive. Along the same lines, when you see a Joe Nuxhall playing at 15, you realize that’s something that likely wouldn’t have happened except during World War II.

Another possible explanation is that some of these Negro League players might have actually been younger than we believe them to have been.

Bill James found (I believe in the 1987 Baseball Abstract) that (obviously once integration occurred) if you took a Black player and a white player with similar statistics at a certain age, over 80% of the time, the Black player went on to ultimately outperform the white player. In other words, he found the Black players aged better. The Negro Leagues were Black, so I mention it. It seems relevant, although clearly no group of players, regardless of ethnicity, has thrived at 42 and beyond in MLB, today or after Jackie Robinson.

(I can’t remember what James found for Latinos; I think he found better aging for them than for white players, but not on a par with Black players.)

The issue of batting average qualifiers who still had plate appearance totals below or well below 502 is not just a Negro League issue. First, for many years a player only needed 100 games to qualify for the batting title, so he could do that and have fewer than 502 plate appearances. Then, 19th-century seasons were often 140 games or less. Since high total plate appearances with batting average qualification seems to have a less ambiguous meaning than just batting average qualification, I took a separate look at 42-and-up seasons using plate appearances themselves.

I also wondered if I was just not capturing the actual demographic because half-time play is just the normal mode for the extremely old, and maybe often handled very well. This could also be why, I thought, my perception of the presence of great players contributing in their 40s exceeded what I was finding. So I did a breakdown by plate appearance range, and went down to 100 plate appearances.

I decided to just look at the National League and American League, since among Negro Leaguers age 42 and older, only Wilson in 1943 had as many as 250 plate appearances when he qualified for the batting title. I had already gotten a good line on Negro League seasons from the extremely old with what today would be considered low plate appearance totals. Also note that detailing the American League means only going back to 1901, since that is when it was formed, while the National League began in 1876.

In the 100-299 plate appearance range, throwing out two pitchers, there are 38 seasons from age 42+ players (a player could count more than once).

The best OPS+: Tony Perez, 1985, 138.

Second-best OPS+: Enos Slaughter, 1958, 133.

The 300-399 PA range shows 12 for 42+ players.

They are headed by Albert Pujols, 2022, who had a 151 OPS+, and then Cap Anson, 1894, who had a 135 OPS+ (not that he knew it).

In the 400-499 PA range, we have eight players.

No one is close to Bonds, who had a 169 OPS+ in his swan song. (How in hell was that performance at the time supposed to have been a disappointment? A season when his mortality without the benefit of PEDS was supposed to have been exposed? This was super human, too.)

The 500 and over PA range only shows eight seasons.

At 134, Fisk tops OPS+ .

Appling, playing shortstop, and with +2 Defensive Runs Saved, is second at 125 OPS+.

Appling is obviously criminally underrated. Does anyone today even mention him when considering the very best extremely old players of all-time?

Of course, age-42+ seasons figure to be dominated by designated hitters, or at least certainly not feature shortstops and catchers. I do think this will be more and more the case as time goes on.

On the other hand, the DH has been an option for players since the Knicks second-most-recent championship, which we all know was a long time ago. Yet the prevalence of extremely old players has increased little, if at all.

Just a survey rather than a formal study suggests that catchers can help at age 40 and beyond. But figuring as a batting average qualifier? Catching that much requires durability at any age, let alone at 42, as Fisk was. To do that was freakish. And Fisk also hit at a level that placed him among the best of the best all-time for his age.

One attitude I may have to rethink, though, is that the more contact there is, the larger the advantage for young players. Extending to football is rash, but do quarterbacks hit the age wall before baseball players? I had always assumed every position but kicker and punter did, including quarterbacks. But these data throw that into doubt. Certainly no hitter has the record past 40 that Brady compiled. As much of a pounding as catchers take, I don’t think it’s equal to what quarterbacks take.

This 500 PA standard improbably grabbed a couple of seasons that 502 PA didn’t. As stat-focused as Rose was, maybe 502 PA was one thing he didn’t care about,¹ because he had 501 in his hit-setting-record 1985 as a 44-year-old.

He sat out the last four games. Maybe he cared about the benchmark but was hurt. And the Reds, although they finished second in the division, knew they would be going home, although they’d learned that for sure a few days earlier. It does seem that Rose’s work really ended after game 154 (even though he played game 158), and that would have been about the time when the Reds actually were mathematically eliminated.

As far as what if any statistical honors Rose cost himself by not finishing the string and getting to the 502 PA, since he was then much more in the career attainment stage, I remember, even in that pre-Moneyball time, that Monday Night Baseball and the like used to report that Rose was among the leaders in on-base percentage. From May 10 on, although it never got to anything ridiculously great, his OBP was always at least .385, and it ended at .395.

Because, to rank among leaders, plate appearances can be added assuming failure, Rose does officially show as 4th in the NL in OBP, despite being 1 plate appearance short of the threshold.

You’d say he couldn’t possibly know about this lifeline. But this was Rose. So maybe he did.

Rose was 44 then, and it would really be splitting hairs to say that Fisk, if he’d had 502 plate appearances at age 43 in 1991, should have been in for any kind of recognition that Rose shouldn’t have been with 501 plate appearances at 44. But Fisk, 1991, too, is a season of 501 plate appearances on the dot.

The only two 42-year-old players to get to 600 plate appearances are Appling and Jim O’Rourke in 1893 (a 91 OPS+ as an outfielder, and 16th in a 12-team league in plate appearances). With 619 plate appearances, Appling had more than O’Rourke, and has bragging rights.

I was curious about Aaron, Mays and Ruth, and surprised they didn’t naturally figure here.

Aaron and Mays actually were part of the subgroups just covered. Both retired after their age-42 seasons, Aaron with 308 PA, Mays with 239.

Ruth retired at age 40. That was his Boston Brave season, just 92 plate appearances.

Obviously, how one understands and characterizes the size of these groups (whether the 66 seasons of 100 or more PA, or the 8 of 500+ PA) is subjective. But my opinion is that it doesn’t make for a very extensive record. That it rather points to rarity.

Forty-two certainly isn’t a round number. It does, however, seem to constitute something of a ceiling, a de facto end of the road for ballplayers (or at least position players).

1. I’m sure he would have cared about it if it made the difference for a batting title! But extremely durable (or amped up on amphetamines) and hitting at the top of the order for excellent teams, Rose didn’t have that problem.