I was first introduced to the concept of accumulative advantage in reading Outliers by Malcolm  Gladwell.  In Outliers Gladwell examines the birth dates of Canadian junior hockey players in which he notes a large trend to the first three months of the year.  In further analysis he notes the age cutoff date for Canadian youth hockey is January 1st.  From these basic observations the idea of accumulative advantage begins to take shape.  A majority of these young men have been the oldest of those in their age groups for their entire competitive lives, at an older age this may not be such a large issue but as Gladwell points out at a younger age the difference in natural ability related to age alone is greater.  The older boys being naturally better athletes are recipients of accumulative advantage.  Through their development they are more likely to be selected for all star teams, be the recipient of extra coaching attention, and play with better line mates among other things.  Multiply this advantage by say ten years and the result is a marked advantage for one boy over another based largely on their birthday.  Gladwell goes on to briefly mention this affect in respect to baseball as well.

The cutoff date for most of youth baseball history until 2006 was July 31st, from this date Gladwell’s theory tells us that we should expect that there would be a skew towards the months of August, September, and October.  To look at a small sample and with the obvious topic of this blog lets look at the Pirates 40 man roster.

Jimmy Barthmaier – January

Sean Burnett – September

Matt Capps – September

Jesse Chavez – August

David Davidson – April

Zach Duke – April

Phil Dumatrait – July

Tom Gorzelanny – July

John Grabow – November

Craig Hansen – November

Jeff Karstens – September

Paul Maholm – June

Evan Meek – May

Ross Ohlendorf – August

Romulo Sanchez – April

Ian Snell – October

Jeff Sues – June

Ronald Uviedo – October

Virgil Vasquez – June

Donald Veal – September

Tyler Yates – August

Robinzon Diaz – September

Ryan Doumit – April

Jason Jaramillo – October

Steven Lerud – October

Pedro Alvarez – February

Brian Bixler – October

Luis Cruz – February

Adam LaRoche – November

Andy LaRoche – September

Freddy Sanchez – December

Ramon Vazquez – August

Neil Walker – September

Jack Wilson – December

Eric Hinske – August

Nate McLouth – October

Nyjer Morgan – July

Brandon Moss – September

Steve Pearce – April

Jose Tabata – August

As you can see Gladwell’s theory of accumulative advantage rears its head in this example as well.  The next question being what does this mean?  Gladwell continues on to mention that essentially you are limiting your talent pool by using a date cutoff for youth sports.  You can still be a big leaguer if you are not born in August, September, or October but it is more difficult.  Of course no system will be perfect and no matter what children will at some point separate themselves with a well timed growth spurt or the the like but what can we do to limit the effect of the date cutoff?  Gladwell suggests splitting the league into multiple smaller leagues divided by smaller groups of months.  This may be unrealistic however due to the logistics and amount of kids involved.  At any rate it does merit some consideration and I myself do not have any grand ideas of how to remedy this but I found Gladwell’s theory and book very interesting and highly suggest it.