The Yankees just bought his age-35 season at $25M, and an option that vests if he "stays healthy" (which I assume is some minimum of starts/innings) for $25M for his age-36 season.

Historically, most pitchers are in significant decline by then.

Anyone ever done a study on fat pitchers vs. skinny pitchers in terms of durability? You simultaneously hear people say that Lincecum won't be durable because he's too thin, and Sabathia won't be durable because he's too fat.

Lost Thought 00: mrtoadswildride: It's more about mechanics....Mariano rivera, curt schilling, pedro martinez, nolan ryan all have different body types and all pitched well in the mid-thirties (or 40s).

They all had easy access to HGH to help improve muscle recovery, thereby enabling them to pitch unnaturally well over the course of long careers. Something Sabathia and Lincicum are likely to find more difficult.

Cy Young pitched effectively until he was 44, and he's thrown more innings than any of them. Early Wynn pitched well through 41. Warren Spahn was an ace at 42, and pitched another 400 iffy innings over the next two years. Eddie Plank was solid through age 41. Don Sutton was good through age 42.

Durability isn't proof of HGH. Heck, Pedro's last healthy season was at age 33.

chimp_ninja: Anyone ever done a study on fat pitchers vs. skinny pitchers in terms of durability? You simultaneously hear people say that Lincecum won't be durable because he's too thin, and Sabathia won't be durable because he's too fat.

My guess would be that durability is the result of a combination of good mechanics and great genetics. Mechanics will help pitchers get the most out of their arm, but at some point it just comes down to how much punishment the arm can take. Body size probably doesn't have that much to do with it, unless that size is impacting mechanics.

But I don't have anything to back that up. I could be very, very wrong

Answered my own question. David Gassko used a database of the height and weight of major league pitchers, and ran the numbers to see if being short/tall/fat/skinny affects performance and durability. Some conclusions from Parts 5 and 6:

"Short and fat pitchers seem to do better than tall or thin ones-I would guess that this is a case of selection bias. Short and fat pitchers don't "look" good, so to make it to the major leagues they really have to be good."

"It's clear that height has no real effect on whether or not a pitcher can shape a long career for himself, but weight certainly does. More surprisingly, fat pitchers have much more staying power than any other group."

"What we find is that being overweight tends to improve a pitcher's projection for the next season, by a little over .02 runs for every ten pounds. If we look at the same spread as for height, that is the range that encompasses 95% of all pitchers, we find that the difference between a thin and fat pitcher's projection will be a little over .11 runs per nine, given that they performed equally in the previous season."

"Tall pitchers, we find, are slightly worse-off than short pitchers, and overweight pitchers tend to perform better than their skinny brethren. Given that overweight pitchers also survive for much longer time periods in the major leagues, all else being equal, invest in fat guys."

Scruffinator: chimp_ninja: all else being equal, invest in fat guys."

So...should we start pumping the lard directly into Verlanders veins, or..?

One caveat to the study is that the author looked at the average weight for all pitchers of a given height in the same era. (Players at all positions have gotten taller and heavier with time, just like in basketball and football.) The method labeled you "fat" if you were in the top X% for your height, but it didn't have any information about whether a guy was Bartolo Colon (plain old fat) or Roger Clemens (bulky, but muscular).

Only two interpretations of his findings make sense to me:
1) He's really detecting a preference for "stocky" -- broad-shouldered, barrel-chested strong guys, of the pre-roids Clemens build. These guys are heavy for their height, but not really "fat".
2) (One of the author's preferred explanations..) Weight has nothing to do with durability or quality. However, scouts think it does, so the only way you make it to the bigs as a fat guy is if you're so amazing that you overwhelm that bias. Therefore, (fat&good) or (fat&durable) are correlated, but not causative in either direction.

Orgasmatron138: I can't think of another fat pitcher with his numbers.

If you secretly own the new York Yankees, don't look at Bartolo Colon's career until age 30. Not Sabathia-good, but still very good until the wheels came off. (The wheels were on a donut wagon.)