At what age do inter-county players reach their peak?

There seems to be no shortage of statistic boffins emerging from the US, and the latest numbers genius to catch the zeitgeist seems to be Nate Silver, now well known from the FiveThirtyEight Blog at the New York Times.

Silver rose to prominence with his stunning electoral predictions, but he began in baseball, where he crunched the vast amount of numbers available and came up with some interesting perspectives on America’s pastime.

Anyway: a flick through his outstanding book, The Signal And The Noise, nudged me towards adopting one of his methods. Silver adapted the approach of another baseball stats guru, Bill James, to work out the age at which baseball players reach their peak — by examining the average age of the MVPs who are picked every season.