The Bigger Picture - Late-Age Breakouts Taking Center Stage

As astute fantasy managers, we are always scouting the next player ready to break out as he approaches his prime. Some phenoms like Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Rafael Devers don't bother waiting until they are of legal drinking age before they announce their arrival as a Major League star but they are clearly exceptions. A baseball player is considered to be prime age around 27. After that, it logically follows that a player would be past their prime once they are in their upper 20s. As someone who is slightly (well) past his prime, I take offense to that.

Each year, a couple of players of "advanced age" emerge to become fantasy studs without warning. Call it the Bautista effect. We even have an annual article identifying late bloomers with the threshold being age 26 or later! Last year, it was Luke Voit taking a leap into stardom, the prior year it was Mike Yastrzemski and before them, it was Max Muncy, who at age 30 keeps raking and showing it was no fluke. Who is this year's late breakout? Turns out we have more candidates than usual.

Players like Yermin Mercedes and Adolis Garcia are looking like All-Stars despite the fact they were on nobody's radar before the season began. Jared Walsh is following in Voit's footsteps by carrying his second-half hot streak into the next season and establishing himself as a bonafide stud. Just as we are inexplicably (*cough dead ball cough) inundated with no-hitters, could we suddenly be looking at multiple late-age breakouts in one season and why?

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Probable Cause

No Minor League Season

The lack of a minor-league season in 2020 and the late start in 2021 took away the chance for many young players to take the field against high-level competition for over a year. Players who may have been afforded a year of development in the minors didn't get that opportunity. Rest assured, that won't do much to affect the Wander Franco types because they will debut when they are deemed ready (and the club is prepared to punch that service time clock). But it pushed back the start time for fringier prospects who didn't get the chance to join the alternate site.

Alternate Site Training

The decision to create alternate sites last year eliminated unnecessary travel and made it easier for clubs to make roster moves for COVID or injury-related reasons. The unique circumstances of 2020, with an overwhelming number of IL stints per week, also allowed many prospects to sample the bigs when they normally wouldn't have. Teams played it safer with their high-end prospects, not wanting to rush them or risk injury for a shortened season. Instead, they opted to play second-tier prospects.

Seattle is the perfect example. I was one of many who bought into the front-office speak when they said they wanted to give youngsters like Jarred Kelenic and Julio Rodriguez a chance to show what they can do and then added them to the alternate site before the 2020 season began. Throw Logan Gilbert into that mix too. These are all young players with a path to playing time in a short season but were held back. Not that the Mariners would do something like that just to manipulate service time.

Slugging Is Forever

The common thread between nearly every late-age breakout player discussed so far is power. Speed isn't a tool that improves with age. Contact rate rarely gets better as you get older. Power can be developed over time, though, as can plate discipline. A batter who relies mostly on the long ball has a far better chance of making an impact later in his career.

Among the current-season slugging leaders (min. 30 PA), 17 of the top 25 are at least 27 years old and six of them are 30 or older.

FWIW, upping the minimum to PA to filter only qualified batters changes a few names but not the end results - still 17 hitters age 27 or older appear on the leaderboard and seven of those are 30+.

What better way is there to break out than with a home run barrage? It helps all the roto stats at once, other than steals, and captures media attention. The older a prospect is before debuting, the more we should focus on his power tool.

Is There a Breakout Age in MLB?

When discussing NFL prospects, you'll often hear people refer to breakout age as a definable metric. PlayerProfiler.com is the best current source for this data and defines it as "the age when a receiver first achieved a 20+% Dominator Rating." Dominator Rating obviously being "the percentage of a wide receiver's total team receiving yards and touchdowns in college."

It's not an exact science, like anything sports-related. A.J. Brown -- wide receiver for the Tennessee Titans for those who don't follow football -- had a breakout age in the 57th percentile. This year, he's becoming a consensus top-five WR. Michael Thomas of the Saints, who was last year's consensus top WR had a breakout age in the 25th percentile. On the other hand, DeAndre Hopkins' breakout age ranks in the 99th percentile, so that proved to be spot on.

The big difference between football and baseball is that pretty much every pro football player goes through the NCAA system whereas baseball players can sign out of college, high school, overseas, or whatever secret lab Shohei Ohtani was created in. They can't be measured equally because player development varies so widely.

Every player develops along a different trajectory. Rather than age, scouts and fantasy nerds like me look to advanced metrics to track improvement. For a pitcher, it may be average velocity or swinging-strike rate. For a hitter, it may be BB-K% or hard-hit rate. That said, we know that MLB players are typically most productive between the ages of 25-27, although that gap is also widening as younger players are increasingly making an impact and more players are able to defy Father Time through advanced training.

This Year's Breakouts

It will never stop sounding odd to me that a 27-year-old is considered a late breakout but as they say, perception is reality.

Let's get to it. Who is experiencing the "Cocoon" effect in 2021?

If we filter the top-15 hitters by age 28 and above in order by weight runs created plus (wRC+), we see some very familiar names as expected. But this season has provided more late-bloomers than usual. I've chosen to leave out the ageless Nelson Cruz on all these lists because he's an outlier in a whole different way that is unearthly.

2021 wRC+ Leaders, Age 28+

Buster Posey and J.D. Martinez are experiencing a resurgence but they have been fantasy studs for years. The names that pop off the screen are Garcia and Mercedes.

Garcia had shown massive power in the minors, jacking 32 homers at Triple-A in 2019 but he didn't break through the Cardinals' system because of a 30.1% K% and subpar defense. In Texas, admittedly not a contender this year, he has been able to carve out a place in the lineup and thrive.

Mercedes is less reliant on the long ball but also a liability on defense which is why he's played every game at DH this season. If not for a season-ending injury to Eloy Jimenez in spring training, we might never have known his name.

Brad Miller doesn't really count as a breakout because he had a mammoth 2016 with the Rays, hitting 30 HR with 81 RBI before falling out of the picture the last couple of years. Plus, he's hitting .319 now but this is a career .243 hitter sporting an insane .436 BABIP in late May. Cliff ahead.

Finally, although he is sliding down the slugging leaderboard, we have to mention Tyler Naquin after his scorching start. He's cooled down considerably, mainly because the Reds haven't played Pittsburgh lately.

Oh ya know, just a casual 7 RBI night for Tyler Naquin. pic.twitter.com/82tFsV4GNG

— Cincinnati Reds (@Reds) April 7, 2021

At age 30, after years as a fourth outfielder in Cleveland, he's taking advantage of his new park which plays friendliest to home runs in terms of Park Factor, if you believe in that sort of thing.

That's a handful of hitters making a name for themselves later than expected. It feels like a lot but is it really more than before?

I'll omit 2020 due to a small sample, as it would be hard to qualify anyone as a true breakout over 60 games.

2019 wRC+ Leaders, Age 28+

Looking at 2019, we have Mich Garver and arguably Mark Canha to some extent but that's it. Every other player had been fantasy-relevant at least once prior.

2018 wRC+ Leaders, Age 28+

We have Aguilar coming up huge after age 27 and David Peralta stepping onto the scene but not a ton of new faces here.

In 2017, Jose Martinez was the poster boy for late-age breakouts and Scooter Gennett also made a splash, going deep 27 times before carrying on his success for one more glorious season. They raked again in 2018 but fell off shortly after.

Generally, we see about two hitters perform unexpectedly well after turning 27 in a given season. It's not as if 2021 has had an explosion of geriatric sluggers but the unusual circumstances surround the past year and a half do seem to have paved the way for more than the norm.

Conclusion

Aaliyah told us "age ain't nothing but a number." If only that were true in professional sports. We marvel at players like Nelson Cruz, Tom Brady, and LeBron James because they can play at an elite level beyond 35, when most athletes have already declined or hung it up entirely. They say it all goes downhill after 30. This may be true for the majority of the population, athletes included, but some guys are just getting started.

How you choose to define the term "breakout" also matters. Robbie Grossman has been an occasional streaming option at best over his career. This season, he's hitting .251 with five HR and 22 RBI but his seven steals rank top-10 in the league. Is that going to make him a breakout player if he returns top-25 OF value, which he's doing right now in OBP leagues, and ranks top-100 among hitters as he is right now? I wouldn't slap on the breakout label for something like that but if he is on your roster helping you win, who cares how you describe him?

It will be interesting to see if Garcia, Mercedes, and others can keep it going all year long. Baseball is back to being a marathon again, so extract the best you can out of these guys through the first half and cross your fingers that Father Time doesn't catch up.

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