Draft Recap Part 2 - By Age!

Drafting by position or via computerized spreadsheet is well and good, but sometimes, the sight of a young rookie with high upside and the potential to be kept for the next 3 season is good enough to make you throw out all plans, rankings, and vestiges of heterosexuality and take the gambol.  Conversely, no matter how good an aged player performs in the previous year, there is always the thought that his broken typewriter body will eventually hit one last pot hole and the screws will come off like in Cool Runnings.  To get a sense of how realistic either one of these two hypothetical situations are, I looked at the draft according to age.

The first thing that I noticed looking at this young fellow in the mirror is the even distribution of body hair throughout the torso.  Then, when shifting my gaze to this young graph, I saw that the overall distribution of ages in our league seems to peak around 29 years old [a little younger than most people in this league.  We are never going to play professional baseball!  I cry!] with more older players being picked than younger players, as shown by the more gentle slope on the right of the peak than the left.  Moreover, I saw that in the early rounds, there is a very large cluster of ~30 year olds being picked up with very few fogies or youngsters.  As we went through the second and third set of set of rounds, this distribution because a bit more heavy on old fellows, but it wasnt until the 13th round where youngsters started to find their way off the board.  As things wound down, a new peak at around 24 years old began to rise with people looking for their young keepers.  It is interesting that there was so much more faith in the old guys (taken much earlier in the draft) than in the young guns (taken much later in the draft) when it is often the youngsters who end up being the break out stars.  At least I found that interesting, and I hope that you did too, though by "you," I mean me, the only one who actually reads this idiotic blog, and I don't even read it that closely after I write it in the first place!

I next wanted to see if there were any teams that were particularly filled with old fellows or youngsters.  Looking at the distribution of ages on each particular team, I was surprised to find that the teams were quite different, as you can clearly see below.  See it I command!

A few things stood out about these distributions.  First is the relative age of Judd and Jeter's teams.  Both seemed to load up on older types at the expense of young talent.  Perhaps they think they can pick it up on the wire?  Who knows what thoughts run through the minds of men!  Regardless, look for these teams to have a rash of injuries and resemble the beloved Ackbars, who are currently dealing with, count 'em, 6 players who are not getting into games these days.  I was also mesmerized by the youth of Lenny Dykstra's and Texas the Foo's teams, whose players seem to peak at about 26 with only a few wily veterans to show the youngsters the way.  Dykstra projects to do well this year, but who knows if those optomistic projections based sometimes on talent alone will translate to major league stats.  Beyond that, everyone else seemed to have a bunch of 29 year olds with a few yongsters and a few more old types hanging around, with Woo Woo and Peachz (here in fashionable hot pink!) having the most clustered distributions.
How will the age of these players affect each team?  Will the old guys have one more year in their arms or will they crumble like a delicious Drake's Coffee Cake?  Will the young fellows be able to withstand the hot glare of the media and perform in the show or will they be more like Steve Nebraska (who actually did both, the breaking down and the performing.  Remember the climax of that ludcrous movie when Brendan Frasier pitched in game 7 of the world series after never pitching before in the majors and throwing just 81 pitches, all strikes, in a complete game perfect game 27K performance.)  Will these teams have the same age distributions at the end of the season?  How will the free agent pickups look in terms of age?  I look forward to watching it all unfold.
In other news, my inbox was flooded with people wanting to write on the blog!  Hyyyche that and reverse it, no one said "boo."  Seriously, if you want to write something, anything, about the league and it wont fit in the message board or you want to attach something or whatnot, shoot me an email!  Or a trade offer!  I guarantee to always give a counter proposal.  Here is a sample topic that you could write about that builds on what you have just read:  "The best picks among players over 35" or "The 5 over-35 years olds who will be better than the under-25 year olds drafted in the same round" or something like that.  I can furnish you with all the data you could ever need or want, though only about fantasy baseball, sorry Justine, you need to gather that thesis data yourself.