HOUSTON — There is a nickname that the more experienced players on the Washington Nationals use to describe themselves: Los Viejos. In Spanish, it means the Old Ones.
The main inspiration was Fernando Rodney, the 42-year-old reliever in his 17th year in the major leagues. But it was infielder Howie Kendrick (36), first baseman Ryan Zimmerman (35) and catcher Kurt Suzuki (36) who started using the term liberally throughout the season.
The Nationals have plenty of viejos, which, by modern baseball standards, is probably anyone over 30. And whenever any of them make a good play in a game, they compliment each other with a salute of, “Hey viejo, nice job.”
“Our slogan is: Let the viejos play,” said the 33-year-old closer Sean Doolittle, a twist on M.L.B.’s “Let the Kids Play” marketing campaign.
Major league clubs are increasingly relying on younger, cheaper players to fill their rosters and shying away from spending top dollar in the free agent market beyond superstars. Analytics-driven front offices have become more wary of aging players’ production dropping off since performance-enhancing drug testing began. Executives covet players’ years of franchise control and brag about amassing it.
But this World Series between the Houston Astros and Nationals has served as a reminder of the power of experience. Although they possess one of the sport’s brightest young stars in Juan Soto (who turns 21 on Friday), the Nationals’ 40-man regular season roster had an average age of 30.9, the oldest in the major leagues. In third place: the Astros, at 29.7.
“Veteran leadership and experience on the baseball field is something that you can’t quantify and can’t put a number to it,” said star pitcher Justin Verlander, who is enjoying a late-career renaissance and is the oldest player on the Astros’ roster. “So in the current state of baseball, if you can’t put a number on it, they don’t want to value it and they don’t want to pay you for it. I would hope the last couple years would show something to it.”
Verlander hinted at an underlying tension. The free-agent market has shifted substantially the past few off-seasons, as teams have become more leery about handing out lengthy contracts to older players. Several over 30 found it difficult to even land jobs, some settling for minor-league contracts.
A related problem in players’ eyes: If they are no longer going to be valued for their past performances in free agency, the younger ones making the league minimum ($555,000 in 2019) should earn more. Players are not eligible for salary arbitration generally until after their third season and free agency until after six.
“Then put it on the front end when you’ve got Breggie going for M.V.P., or Yordan coming up and creating more value than the league minimum,” said Astros reliever Joe Smith, 35, referring to his teammates third baseman Alex Bregman, 25, and designated hitter Yordan Alvarez, 22, a front-runner for the American League Rookie of the Year Award.
That economic structure will be a point of contention in labor negotiations, as the current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2021 season. But beyond earnings, performance ultimately matters, too.
While younger players are generally more athletic, they can lack experience on how best to apply it. As Smith put it: “It’s easy to get here, it’s hard to stay.”
The average major league career lasts roughly four years, and Tony Clark, the executive director of the players’ union, said it takes all sorts of adjustments to hang around that long and more — from learning to hit breaking balls to fine-tuning training habits for a six-month regular season. He said the “symbiotic chain” between veteran and novice players had been eroded.
“Veteran players can help shorten learning curves,” Clark said earlier this year. “The effect we’re seeing now by more and more of the veteran guys being moved out is a young group of players that are learning on the fly. That’s challenging.”
Seven of the 10 oldest teams in the major leagues made the postseason this year, which isn’t a shock since contending teams usually move to supplement youthful cores with free-agent veterans. The youngest teams to reach the playoffs this season — the Tampa Bay Rays (28), Oakland Athletics (27.9) and Minnesota Twins (27.8) — are in the bottom half of M.L.B.’s payroll rankings. The youngest teams in baseball — the San Diego Padres (25.8) were the youngest, and finished 70-92 — were rebuilding and had shed most of their more experienced, better-paid players.
Many players on the Astros, one of the most unapologetically analytics-driven teams, said they would not have won the 2017 World Series without Carlos Beltran, a designated hitter who was 40 at the time and hit .231 with 14 home runs, and Brian McCann, a catcher who was 33 and hit .241 with 18 home runs. Their production wasn’t commensurate with their combined salaries of $33 million, but they still added value.
Beltran, who retired after that season, helped young hitters learn to game plan against opposing pitches, while McCann, who retired after two seasons later, mentored young pitchers.
“It felt like a winning atmosphere,” said Astros shortstop Carlos Correa, now 25.
“They gave us a lot of confidence and made us believe that we were the best team out there and had to compete like it,” Correa continued. “Having veterans on the team is huge. It helped the younger guys set the tone, and to speak when they had to speak in meetings or when the team is not playing good.”
The Nationals saw that firsthand this season. In late May, when they sat at 19-31, it was difficult to imagine them making the playoffs, let alone being up two games to none in the World Series against the juggernaut Astros.
But midseason acquisitions like outfielder Gerardo Parra, 32, and Rodney helped settle the team. Nationals General Manager Mike Rizzo said Rodney was a pseudo-coach to young relievers since his arrival, while Kendrick was the same for hitters.
“That’s a big help,” Rizzo said. “But bottom line: They’ve got to be able to play. If you can’t play, they’re not here just for their personality.”
Parra and Rodney contributed in their limited roles, and Kendrick had a big impact: His .344 average and .966 on-base-plus-slugging-percentages in 121 regular season games were the best marks of his career. He was the M.V.P. of the National League Championship Series sweep over the St. Louis Cardinals.
It has been the best postseason of Kendrick’s career, and past experience has certainly helped in October. James Paxton, a Yankees starter with parts of seven major-league seasons under his belt, said he couldn’t feel his body when he made his first career postseason start this month and pitched unevenly. (He was much improved by his third outing.)
“I like a veteran presence, but especially when it’s combined with a really good young core,” said Rizzo, who has one in outfielder Victor Robles (22), shortstop Trea Turner (26), third baseman Anthon Rendon (29) and Soto.
The Nationals’ average age, though, is a tad skewed because of Rodney. He has been around so long that one of his former teammates is in the other dugout during the World Series, but not playing: Astros Manager A.J. Hinch, 42, who was Rodney’s catcher while the two were on the 2003 Detroit Tigers. Hinch was stunned but proud that Rodney, a viejo, was still throwing hard at his age.
“Fernando,” Hinch said at a news conference this week, “if you’re listening, keep playing.”