It is interesting that when we examine issues relating to talent and how it is developed and where it comes from, some very fascinating pieces of information emerge.
Recent studies have shown that factors like birth month and whether a child is born in a relatively warm weather state has a higher correlation to success in sports generally and baseball in particular than ever imagined.
When I was coaching little league baseball, we called it "having a good birthday". It played as much of a role in the selection of players as baseball ability. Although maybe not as much as having a "GLM", but I digress. Now famous authors like Malcolm Gladwell and well respected university professors have put a name on it - The Relative Age Effect.
The theory is that children born only slightly after the cut-off date in age divided leagues by virtue of being older (and presumably bigger, stronger, more mature) than their peers accrue selection and developmental advantages. This effect is found within the educational system as well since when a child enters the system revolves around their birth date. The implication for future success in life is an issue here, just as it is for those involved in youth sports. It may in fact be a more important factor in the educational system (but this is a baseball blog and I am trying to stay on task).
These effects begin early in the sports career and the resulting head start obtained carries over into senior and elite competition. The effects are long lasting and appear to be more pronounced for males than females.
For further discussion of the Relative Age Effect in particular and other that lead to successful development (whether in sports, music, business, etc.) I would recommend:
Expert Performance in Sports by Starkes & Ericcson
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Talent is Overrated (What really separates world-class performers from everybody else) by Geoff Colvin
and
The Talent Code (Greatness isn't born it's grown. Here's how) by Daniel Coyle
All are exceptional books.
OBTW (which means "Oh, by the way" thereby defeating the purpose of using an acronym) the term GLM means "Good Looking Mom". Most little league coaches know this term and use it in talent identification and player selection at the most junior levels in little league.
As the use and application of this metric was explained to me by a more experienced coach when I first began my foray into coaching baseball - "Charlie, if you're going to lose, you may as well enjoy the view".
WISE WORDS INDEED.
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Summary from Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers: The Story of Success.
According to Gladwell the potential bounty of athletic prowess isn't so much in the genes as it is in a child's birth date.----
Consider Canadian junior hockey, in which the cutoff date for age eligibility is Jan. 1.
"A boy who turns ten on January 2, then could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year," Gladwell writes, exploring why a disproportionate number of elite hockey players have been born in January and February. "In preadolescence, a 12-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity." The older athletes gain all the benefits of age bias: They're viewed as better because they are bigger, placed on teams with superior coaching and chosen to play in all-star games that enhance their development.
Gladwell finds similar results in U.S. baseball, in which cutoff dates for most youth leagues have been July 31, meaning, as he writes, "more major league players are born in August than in any other month."
The table below lays out the full month-to-month data. As of the 2005 season, 503 Americans born in August had made it to the major leagues compared with 313 American born in July. . . .
The pattern is unmistakable. From August through the following July, there is a steady decline in the likelihood that a child born in the United States will become a major leaguer. Meanwhile, among players born outside the 50 states, there are some hints of a pattern but nothing significant enough to reach any conclusions. An analysis of the birth dates of players in baseball’s minor leagues between 1984 and 2000 finds similar patterns, with American-born players far more likely to have been born in August than July. The birth-month pattern among Latin American minor leaguers is very different—if anything, they’re more likely to be born toward the end of the year, in October, November, and December.----------
The magical date of Aug. 1 gives a strong hint as to the explanation for this phenomenon. For more than 55 years, July 31 has been the age-cutoff date used by virtually all nonschool-affiliated baseball leagues in the United States. Youth baseball organizations including Little League, Cal Ripken/Babe Ruth, PONY, Dixie Youth, Hap Dumont, Dizzy Dean, American Legion, and more have long used that date to determine which players are eligible for which levels of play. (There is no such commonly used cutoff date in Latin America.) The result: In almost every American youth league, the oldest players are the ones born in August, and the youngest are those with July birthdays. For example, someone born on July 31, 1990, would almost certainly have been the youngest player on his youth team in 2001, his first year playing in the 11-and-12-year-olds league, and of average age in 2002, his second year in the same league. Someone born on Aug. 1, 1989, by contrast, would have been of average age in 2001, his first year playing in the 11-and-12-year-olds division, and would almost certainly be the oldest player in the league in 2002.
Twelve full months of development makes a huge difference for an 11- or 12-year-old. The player who is 12 months older will, on average, be bigger, stronger, and more coordinated than his younger counterpart, not to mention more experienced. And those bigger, better players are the ones given opportunities for further advancement. Other players, who are just as skilled for their age, are less likely to be given those same opportunities simply because of when they were born. . . .
This phenomenon will not come as news to social scientists, who have observed the same patterns in a number of different sports. The first major study of what has become known as the “relative age effect” . . . determined that NHL players of the early 1980s were more than four times as likely to be born in the first three months of the calendar year as the last three months. In 2005, a larger study on the relative age effect in European youth soccer . . . . found a large relative age effect in almost every European country, though it seems to shrink in adult leagues and is less significant in women’s soccer. . . .
Interestingly enough, the relative age effect doesn’t appear in the two other major American sports leagues. . . .
"Born to play ball: the relative age effect and major league baseball" by AH Thompson, RH Barnsley,
The website below provides a brief summary of the work and a couple of illustrative graphs showing the effect. The entire report is available via .pdf below.
http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/relage.htm#Baseball
PDF of the report available here:
http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/RelAgeMLB.pdf
The upper graph (SHOWN BELOW) shows the influence of the relative age effect among Major League Baseball players. However, the magnitude of the effect is much lower than that found among other sports like soccer and hockey (see the soccer results for a graph depicted on the same scale).
In an attempt to understand this, we studied Little League players where the effect was presumed to be rooted. Our analysis of team rosters did not reflect the presence of an effect of any significance. It was only when we compared those selected for post-season play with those who were not selected, did an effect emerge. But as the lower figure shows, the differing trends for these two groups showed neither the magnitude nor the clarity found in other sports . This weak effect among professional baseball players was thus hypothesized to be a natural consequence of its weak development during the formative years of Little League. This, in turn, might be explained by the size of the age-range used by Little League teams - often 4 to 5 years - much larger than that found in other team sports. Thus, all budding baseball players are at a disadvantage when they begin, and all will have an advantage in later years. This may neutralize some of the mechanisms that might be "in play" in other sports.
Sources:
1. Thompson AH, Barnsley RH, Stebelsky G (1991). Born to play ball: The relative age effect and Major League Baseball. Sociology of Sport Journal, 8, 146-151 (for a copy click here)
2. Thompson AH, Barnsley RH, Stebelsky G (1992). Baseball performance and the relative age effect: Does Little League neutralize birth date selection bias? Nine, 1(1), 19-30.
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