Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus released their annual PECOTA projections. PECOTA is a projection system which takes a player’s track record over the past few seasons and uses that data to project what a player is most likely to do over the upcoming season. Part of the process includes incorporating what comparable players have historically done at the same age as the player PECOTA is projecting.
Projections systems should obviously never be taken as gospel but they have real value in the sense that, unlike us flawed mortals, they’re not heavily impacted by recency bias. Humans are quick to forget what happened in recent years and, as a result, we have a tendency to overreact to breakout or breakdown seasons.