sell. sell. sell.

i thought you were still on the team!

The evidence about hockey players – which went mainstream in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” – is that young hockey players born at the beginning of the calendar year, who (because January 1st is the cutoff to determine what age group a kid plays in) are the oldest players in their league, tend to be slightly better than their younger teammates, which means they’re more likely to make All-Star teams, get expert coaching, make travel teams, etc – meaning they’re more likely to improve over time, and more likely to reach the NHL. A similar but smaller effect occurs in baseball, only the cutoff in baseball is August 1st – there are far more American-born baseball players born in August than in July. (The age cutoff has recently been moved from August 1st to May 1st, I believe.)

But my study reveals sort of the opposite. In this case, every player selected in the draft has already shown elite talent, but in this case it’s the younger player who simply has more time and physicial maturation on his side, and is likely to improve more. This effect is NOT an artifact of some artificial cut-off date; you could hold the draft on any day of the year, and some draft picks are always going to be younger than others.

I hope that makes sense.

i kept telling him how happy he’ll be that he did. then he blew his knee out playing catcher on a play at the plate.

I had some interest from Fordham in NYC, Kellogg (not a bad baseball school in Michigan) and some other smaller colleges. I probably got about 10 recruiting letters.

It was all downhill from there. I partied alot that summer and had a disappointing senior year. Ended up playing at Kalamazoo College (my top academic school) and had a decent career for them but our teams were horrible.

My claim to fame is striking out 3 times in one game against a guy from Hope College the Indians drated in like the 35th round.