Clark Calvin Griffith first played major league baseball for the St. Louis Browns and the Boston Reds of the American Association in 1891. He earned the nickname "The Old Fox" as a pitcher, and became the owner of the Washington Senators in 1920.
The Griffiths ran the franchise until 1984, when the Senators' descendants -- the Minnesota Twins -- were sold to Carl Pohlad.
Clark Griffith, now a Minneapolis attorney, was raised in this baseball family. He heard much theorizing from The Old Fox, and from his father Calvin (the gentleman who moved the team to Minnesota 50 1/2 years ago), and from his uncles Joe Cronin and Sherry Robertson, and from the hundreds of scouts, managers, coaches and players that were intertwined with the Griffiths.
There was a point in the 1970s -- perhaps the day in 1971 when Tony Oliva, 32, and Harmon Killebrew, 35, both flew home from Oakland with injuries and the Twins' second decade in Minnesota went south -- when Clark began to realize that a ballplayer's peak of performance occurred much earlier than conventional wisdom dictated.
"I went to the Baseball Encyclopedia and started looking at the numbers," Griffith said. "I studied it for months. I reached the conclusion that players with good careers, from Hall of Famers to solid major leaguers, entered their prime at 25, reached a peak at 27 or 28, and then started to decline.
"That's why I'm worried about the Twins in the near future. I look at the roster and don't see birth dates in 1985 or later. That tells me they don't have players entering their prime. They have a few at the peak, 27 or 28, but by 2012 or 2013, those players will be on other side of the cycle, and I don't see the standout players coming up to replace them."
There is more complex research than Griffith's that suggests ages 26 to 31 are the range when ballplayers reach a peak.
Clearly, you can offer hundreds of exceptions to such theories on a player's prime and peak. This would be particularly true in results taken from baseball's recently completed steroids era, when those extra vitamins enabled a large-headed chap such as Barry Bonds to smash 445* of his 762* home runs after he reached the past-prime age of 32 on July 24, 1996.