Part-Time Slugger

All these studies face the same fundamental problem: To figure out whether players tend to do better or worse in a given year of their contracts, they first need to determine how well a player should perform. In other words, they have to guess what David Wright would be expected to do in his 2012 season, given everything else we know about him, and then compare that guess to his actual performance. That's a tricky task, and one beset by confounding correlations. For one thing, an athlete's output has a lot to do with his age: A player might improve his stats through his late 20s, and then start to decline as he reached his mid-30s. By the time David Wright gets to the end of his next contract, he'll be a creaky 35 or 36?a point of his career where most guys are barely producing at all. In that case, Wright would be overperforming just by keeping his numbers out of the gutter.

nick young south dakota state long beach state beasley trailblazers michael beasley jermaine jones