Is Baseball Prime Real?

Baseball starts tomorrow, which is my favorite sport to argue. In every other sport, a casual fan will still fight with you over their team despite their shocking lack of knowledge. Not baseball. If you pick a baseball fight, majority of the time, your opponent will tell you baseball isn’t their thing. But if you start an argument with a real fan who knows their stuff? It’s gloves off every time. 

My latest such squabble was with my idiot Mets fan friend about “signing someone in their prime”. To which I countered, doesn’t exist. My buddy argued that despite his plethora of injuries, missing the whole  season last year, that Noah Syndergaard is about to have his best seasons because he’s “coming into his prime”. While I think he still has the chance to be good, I think the odds are that Noah’s 95 mph sliders caught up with his elbow. That his best baseball is behind him. 

But he wouldn’t hear it. All because he’s supposedly about to have some magical birthday. 

There was never a meeting or an announcement on prime ages but everyone has the same exact numbers in their head. I remember my older cousins explained it to me while playing MVP 05. During the early 2000s, the steroid era, prime was accepted as around 32-36. With more years and less PEDs that window has changed more to 28-32. I’d say most people would accept that as truth. Not me. 

Baseball is weird in that it’s really the only sport where you’re guaranteed to start out in a lower league after you’re drafted. NFL and NBA wouldn’t send their precious first round picks on bus rides with no A/C for a showdown between the Rumble Ponies and the Trash Pandas? Baseball does, which makes a prime age impossible. Each team is different in feeling out if a guy is ready for a call up. Mix in service time manipulation and you have a recipe for guys getting the call at all different ages. It’s not how old you are, but how much tread is on the tires.

Take Felix Hernandez for example. Feels like the guy has been around since I was a child. He’s only 34. From age 29-32 Felix’ ERAs were 3.53, 3.82, 4.36, and 5.55 respectively. From age 23-27? 2.49, 2.27, 3.47, 3.06, and 3.04.

Now, I’m not an idiot. I understand that Felix here could be an outlier and that one person doesn’t prove my point. But like, it does though and you know it does. Plus I’m not going to sit here and throw hundreds of ERAs at you.

So why have we all blindly accepted an MLB prime? Where did it come from? I’ll tell you, it was that slimy bastard Scott Boras who made it up. Yup. How else could he get washed up players to make hundreds of millions of dollars? Make up the prime, that’s how.