Collette Calls: Respect Your Elders

Just over three seasons ago, I authored an installment of this column titled, "No Sport For Old Men?" I looked at players age 33 or older with at least 100 plate appearances at that point of the season and found several different older players returning double-digit profits to fantasy managers at that point of the season, led by Paul Goldschmidt who was hitting .340/.423/.617 at that point of the season with 19 homers, 61 runs and 65 runs driven in. Yet that table also showed a large list of older players with negative returns on investment compared to their previous season such as Adam Duvall, Yuli Gurriel and Whit Merrifield.  The concluding paragraphs of that piece read as follows:

Merrifield's disappointing season was not something I envisioned when boldly predicting him not finishing inside the top 60. I thought he would have issues this year, but not to this extent. Donaldson should have been a solid fit in Yankee Stadium, but he has once again struggled to fit in with a team and has not done well at the plate. Pollock, forced to change teams via a trade at the very end of camp, has struggled like many in his clubhouse while Duvall's struggles really were not surprising when we go back and look at how his 2021 success was built on a weak foundation of skills.

The larger point being, the other thing these guys really have in common is being long in the tooth. Safe skills on paper have not done any better than risky skill sets. The question must be asked: have we given too much forgiveness to safe/boring vets? Are they just as volatile of fantasy assets on a roster as unproven kids? The new environment of baseball control with production and storage appears to have presented an accelerator to the aging curve for players that we as an industry should revisit in the winter once we have more complete data.

Fantasy pundit and life coaches alike have often preached that boring is good; boring means you're safe. It is so tempting to take the next hot name in the middle to late rounds of a draft when a proven veteran player with recent flaws is staring you right in the face. Yet we often embrace the unknown rather than lean on what we do know.  That can sometimes work out well, but this season, there have been two massive swings and misses with this approach.

George Springer and Giancarlo Stanton were not exactly draft targets for many fantasy managers. Springer had an ADP of 250 in Rotowire Online Championship leagues with a range from 214 to 314, while Stanton was at 352 with a range from 253 to 359 and only went in 43 of the 234 drafts, mostly due to the uncertainty around his return date related to soreness in both elbows from seemingly curling cars in the offseason. Stanton was also utility-only for drafts, but the table below shows the outfielders within 25 spots of Springer's ADP in the 234 Rotowire Online Championship drafts:

Lee is the only one of the players in the group who has returned a positive return on investment. We cannot go back and change the past, but we can learn from it. Hindsight is always a crystal clear 20/20, but there was little hope in Springer's 2024 indicators which would have led anyone to believe this type of 2025 was in store for him. There is a social media trend with some audio which says, "How does this...turn into THIS!" and it perfectly applies to Springer:

Springer's 2024 profile looked like the boilerplate version of a veteran player in his mid 30's: good plate discipline with a good volume of both walks and strikeouts, with most everything else near or below average. Baseball remains a young man's game for the elite skills, and the likelihood of players producing at an elite level gets increasingly difficult every season, especially into the mid-30's. My purpose of this article is to look forward, so I am not going to write about the process of how this happened, because it's already been done by a few others ths summer. I encourage you to look at the work from these three articles (each word separately hyperlinked) which do a great job at looking at some of the process changes Springer made that has led to his resurgence this season. Read those articles, because it's part of the homework later in this column.

Stanton is, literally, a different monster. The physical freak of nature had two penalties during the 2025 draft season: a lack of position and the umpteenth reminder of how his physical nature repeatedly betrays him:

Stanton has not played a full season since 2018, and the offseason optimism of him picking up where he left off in the 2024 postseason was drowned out by the news he had tendonitis in both of his elbows. His 2024 profile was its usual bright red self in all measures having to do anything with hitting the ball hard, as Stanton has never lost that skill. Yet, around those missiles off his bat were several swings and misses, with an undisciplined approach which is atypical of someone of his age and experience.

Stanton did not return to the big league roster until June 16 and hit a miserable .243/.333/.270 the rest of that month, but from July 1 until the end of August he was tied for third with a 199 wRC+ with Jackson Chourio, trailing only the aforementioned Springer and Nick Kurtz. Stanton's 17 homers were third-best over the that time as he hit as many as Cal Raleigh did, but he also hit 126 points better in batting average than the possible AL MVP. The slider profiles above show that Stanton is mostly the same as he ever was, except he's doing a better of job of not chasing pitches out of the zone and is murdering fastballs (.315 BA, .674 SLG) the way he did in 2021. 

Since Major League Baseball got serious with performance enhancing drug testing, we have rarely seen the type of season Springer and Stanton are having from a player age 35 or older. Since 2009, Stanton's current OPS is the seventh-best for any player (minimum 200 plate appearances) in that category, while Springer's is the 14th-best:

Moving forward, we as fantasy managers must be wary of recency bias. We could use these two examples as definitive proof to aggressively target later-round veterans with previously proven success, or we could treat them as outliers while focusing on how Carlos Santana, Andrew McCutchen, Marcus Semien and Starling Marte have not statistically aged well this season. Semien may be the best counterexample to Springer and Stanton, because Semien was a top-100 pick this past draft season despite a profile which looked like this, because fantasy managers were banking on the volume of his production that has been there throughout:

Like Merrifield before him, the volume of playing up the middle appears to have caught up with Semien this year, as his production lagged most of the season before a brief summer hot streak that cooled off before he finally hit the injured list for good this season. 

Now, the aforementioned homework. I would like to hear from you in the comments section who are some players who you feel will be the 2026 versions of Springer, Stanton and Semien. Let's focus the discussion on players ages 33 or older who you expect to be there in the later rounds who could take that step forward, or an older player who will be in the single-digit rounds of a draft who you believe is in danger of a drastic decline. 

My three names: Christian Walker, Jorge Soler, and Jose Altuve.