When the Stars (Re)Align

If you’re a nineties baby playing in the majors, I think your time has passed. Make way for Gen Z. The 2000’s babies. Even the 2005 babies are starting to make a real impact. 

Bye bye Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and hello Junior Caminero. So long Juan Soto and welcome Pete Crow-Armstrong. Sal Stewart, yes you’ll be taking over for Mr. Manny Machado. And Fernando Jr. of Tatis fame? The McGonigle and Wetherholt party will take it from here. 

So many of our favorite young stars from the last five years have aged out of rising stardom and seem to be either plateauing or, even worse, skiing down the final hill, and fast. 

Here’s a quick collection of players I’d consider consensus picks to become generational stars a few years ago who are currently between 27 and 29 years old. To me, this captures the players many of us would have confidently said were entering the primes of their careers as recently as two years ago. Not yet on the hill, and surely not over it. 

You’ll notice (that Ozzie Albies really hasn’t been elite in a while and) that I’m focusing on hitters with this group. That’s intentional. Watching Chris Sale throw 100mph the other day at the advanced age of 37 years old makes me want to look more at pitcher aging this offseason, and the survivorship bias that perhaps should color our analysis of starting pitchers especially.

But for this analysis, I wanted to dig into hitters. The established 27-29 year old  “stars” have largely been anything but this season, especially for fantasy. And maybe even over the last two seasons?

Of the 11 players above, only four have one season over the last two years with 30 or more home runs. Only three have one season where they drove in 100 runs. Or drove in 100 RBI. Only four have one season with a WAR over 5. 

And sure, this season isn’t over. But only three have one season hitting over .290. Only Juan Soto slugged over .500 in both seasons. Only four have at least one season with a wRC+ better than 150. 

With the exceptions of Albies, Riley, and Raleigh, these hitters have been considered upper echelon talents in each of the last two drafts. And we, the fantasy drafting public, have been paying for them, with mixed results. 

Meanwhile, further down Age Curve Hill, Sal Stewart is leading the majors in RBI. Pete Crow-Armstrong is likely to win MVP in the National League. Bobby Witt Jr. leads the American League in WAR. Younger players are doing well, not just when compared to one another, but at the top end of the league.

You’ll notice three first basemen on the wrong side of thirty and otherwise, a fairly young list. But this is a WAR leaderboard, and we play fantasy baseball! So I’ll sort by wOBA instead.

A few more first basemen make the cut, as do a pair of DHs in Shohei Ohtani and Kyle Schwarber. The only every day defender in this group that doesn’t start at first base is Seiya Suzuki. 

So clearly, the top-end talent in the league is stratified by position and, outside of 1Bs and DHs, skews younger. 

And overall? 

Players who are 26 years old or younger are collectively slashing .244/.318/.400 with a 99 wRC+ this season. Players who are 27 years old and older are slashing .243/.319/.399 with a 100 wRC+. 

Okay, so the “olds” can still hang. But what about when you cut at 30 years old? Both groups still have a 100 wRC+. 

But again, this is about fantasy baseball. We’re looking for actionable takeaways for drafts next season and beyond. We want to know if the industry will be overdrafting older stars, allowing us to push up younger stars to win leagues and be showered in neverending glory. And praise, praise would be nice.

To do this, we first need to know if this year’s 26 and under hitters are outliers, especially at the top-end. I’ll attack that question a few different ways. 

Let’s start by asking if the 26-and-under hitters this year have been better by wRC+ and wOBA than past cohorts.

I looked at hitters since 1980 with a minimum of 200 plate appearances per season. And whether you look at the top 10 hitters or top 20 hitters at 26 years old or younger, this year’s class is not a better hitting group by wOBA or wRC+. In fact, they’re actually weaker as a group than most of the top end young hitters in the ‘80s and from the mid-2000’s on.

The more interesting trend seems to be the relative positive trend of young hitters from 2010 up until COVID, when understandably, development opportunities cratered, and young hitter talent seemingly has yet to recover. 

So the best of the youngsters aren’t any better than they’ve ever been. But what about the full group, with no plate appearance minimums and top tier cutoffs? As a group, are the hitters under 26 years old in 2026 better by wRC+ and wOBA than past classes?

While wOBAs for young hitters have bounced around as steroids were phased out and more elite pitching was phased in, wRC+ paints a clearer picture, centered around league average. Since bottoming out in the early 2000’s, younger hitters have continued to improve relative to the league average. As a group, they’ve gone from being meaningfully weaker to, well, average. 

For us fantasy managers, this really just means that you can draft younger depth pieces with more confidence. But young elite players from this class are still not any more dominant at the dish than those from other eras. They are, though, roughly just as strong. 

And perhaps we’re at the beginning of a 2010s-level trend, where young hitters are being developed and rocking and rolling as elite big league bats. If we’re at the beginning of a realignment, which anecdotal examples like falling stars passing rising stars on their way up this season is telling me, then that could very well be the case, for both average players and elite bats.

Does this match how we’ve been drafting young players in recent years, especially at the top of drafts, where picks are most consequential?

Comparing the under-26 hitters (dark green) and the over-27 hitters (light green) is more interesting. Since 2015, fantasy managers clearly have favored relatively older hitters. But does this match top end fantasy performance?

The FanGraphs Player Rater only goes back to 2021, but the answer is clearly no. Over the last six seasons, the hitters under 26 years old in the top 20 by ADP have outperformed the hitters over 27 in all but one season. 

So to recap, many of the top end hitters we’ve grown used to over the last few seasons struggled mightily this year. And while this year’s under-26 year old hitter cohort has been unremarkable relative to other such classes over the years, the overall pool of these young hitters has improved steadily since the early 2000s. 

On the flip side, fantasy managers have not been drafting younger hitters earlier, even though since 2021, younger hitters taken in the early rounds have largely outperformed their older counterparts. 

Sure looks to me like a realignment…

And while to this point I’ve had my redraft leagues hat on, I think there’s a lesson here for dynasty managers as well. If you have some 27-29 year old players who are still thought of as young and rising stars, it may be time to try and sell while the sell high is still possible. Deeper analysis and honestly, player-by-player analysis may be the nuance level required to make those decisions, but this analysis suggests it may at least be worth a look.