Over at Slate, Baseball Prospectus alum Greg Spira takes a look at the breakdown of baseball players by birth month. He notes that, since most baseball leagues (from the little league level on up) use July 31st as a cutoff date, players born in August have a natural advantage. At each step of the game, they can be months older than their peers. The result is that there are approximately 50% more major leaguers born in August than in July.

I wonder if this effect would persist if you looked at just the most elite players. I suspect that among the very best hitters and pitchers, this factor reduces to random noise.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Asides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.