Does Size Matter? Batting Cages and Baseball

[WayBackVazquez]

Darryl Strawberry is 6'6".

Played at least 100 games in 10 seasons. Never had fewer than 24 HR or an OPS+ of less than 125 in those. Career OPS+ of 138. Pretty good hitter.

 

[SumnerH]

Can you not agree that baseball players have not gotten bigger at the same degree as other sports?

 
Why do we have to "agree"?  We can look it up.
 
Since 1965, both the average MLB player and NBA player have both gotten about 1" taller (I picked the NBA because they seem likely to have the absolute most pressure to select for height of anything).  
 
I don't have 1960s data, but since 1970 the average NFL player has gotten shorter.
 
Ball's in your court to provide some actual data if you're going to keep throwing out variations on the theme.
 
 
 
*From 1949-1965 the NBA saw a huge height spike, but that's normal in a new sport; the first couple of decades as it transitions toward being a real, popular, professional sport see it change dramatically.

 

[reggiecleveland]

delete

 

[reggiecleveland]

Well, as much as Moneyball types talk the talk about skills and stats, they still run the 60 at every showcase and drool over the winners of that track meet.

And I think the crux of this thread is tall man Reggie explaining why he isn't a major league hitter...a few fewer inches, and he woulda been in the show for sure.

 
Not at all sadly I am a height where guys have excelled since the 1920s, in almost every sport. I wished it was just a matter of being big and strong, but skill is what matters. The guys that beat me in my proven sport were just a lot quicker, and much more skilled.

 

[reggiecleveland]

 
Why do we have to "agree"?  We can look it up.
 
Since 1965, both the average MLB player and NBA player have both gotten about 1" taller (I picked the NBA because they seem likely to have the absolute most pressure to select for height of anything).

 
I did. I can see you chose to link your data to years you had NFL data, but you missed the time period where the NBA players grew the most. Well I concede the premise height hurts hitters from the book seems false, the idea that other sports have had a bigger increase in size than baseball is not. But while the NFL and NBa seemed to flatten out, pitchers at least seem to continue getting taller.
 
 
This article says the average olineman has gone from 6-0 210 in the 20s to 6-5 310 today
http://www.businessinsider.com/nfl-50s-tim-tebow-would-have-been-an-offensive-lineman-2011-10?op=1
The NFL average is mostly due to running backs getting shorter since 1970, but few psotions have changed morew than an inch since 1970.
 
Nba players have gone from 6-4 in the 50s to 6-7 ever since 1980. (perhaps the 3 point line ended the advantage of increasingly bigger players, that was a stated goal of some proponents) Batter height stayed constant from 1950 to 1980 and even with the recent uptick has gone up only an inch in the time basketball increased 3 inches.  The NFL lineman in 1950 was 6-2, so they too have gotten three inches taller while the batters grew an inch. Pitchers have gotten two inches taller. So yeah other sports have had bigger increases in height than baseball, but while they seem to have stopped getting bigger.
 
Generall pitchers have been two inches taller than hitters. For whatever reason that difference shrunk to one inch during the 1990s. According to the graph batter heights leveled off around 1989, but pitcher height started going up again around 2001.
http://www.azsnakepit.com/2010/7/5/1550963/baseball-players-does-size-matter
Anyway rereading the book the author seems to cherry pick his stats. His contention that NBA players are bigger is based on the heights of starting fives of NBA championship teams, and WS winners.
Pitchers are red batters are blue.
 

 
[SIZE=11pt]What has really changed is the weight of players, and lest we think roids were the reason the climb in weight has not slowed[/SIZE]
 
[SIZE=11pt]

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Anyway I stated a thesis from a book, and the stat that most convinced there is an error is the number of huge DHs. Obviously these guys get their job purely to hit. Probably a limit on guys over 6-5 is the inability of giants to play well enough in the field. Likewise the higher pitcher height has to do with the fact every pitcher is a specialist, you don't have middle infielders in there bringing the height down.
 
I would propose the slower increase in hitter size is due to the great popularity baseball had in the early parts of the 20th century having a 50 year head start on getting elite athletes. And while the NBA seems to have reached a plateau where the size of players had a diminishing return, baseball reached that period earlier.

 

[SumnerH]

I would propose the slower increase in hitter size is due to the great popularity baseball had in the early parts of the 20th century having a 50 year head start on getting elite athletes. And while the NBA seems to have reached a plateau where the size of players had a diminishing return, baseball reached that period earlier.

 
I think that's exactly right.  
 
I'm not sure going back more than 50 years makes sense--as I said in the earlier footnote, the first couple of decades of a new sport are going to be pretty noisy as it shifts toward life-long professionals and gains market share against established sports.  And even leaving that aside, what happened in the 1950s is not particularly enlightening in terms of the current sport.  
 
Essentialy, yeah, the NBA and NFL wildly outpaced MLB from 1920-1965 or thereabout, but MLB was an already established sport.  Those were sports transitioning to major professional sports.  Over the past 40+ years, the differences have been pretty negligible--the NBA might have outdone MLB by a few percentage points, but not a ton, and the NFL overall has seen a decline in height (OL have grown about an inch but that's offset around the rest of the field).
 
This doesn't look like baseball having some weird height cliff of performance, just that it was established earlier and drew real athletes earlier (especially since the difference has vanished in recent decades).
 
 
 
 
Weight is a totally different topic--I thought it was intriguing skimming the basketball stats to see that weights were nearly the same from 1965-1990 and from 2000-present, but there was a huge burst from 1990-2000 (exact years might be slightly off, I'm going from memory here).

 

[reggiecleveland]

I was talking about how baseball had great hitters in the 6-3 range from the 20s on, it is relevant. I stated baseball players have not increased in size as much as other sports, and that is correct they have not. Both the NFL, NBA, and the NHL have gone to great lengths to make the game less about power and size and more open and exciting, while the DH rule has allowed basically another 1b type on the roster. Despite than baseball has stayed a lot more stable. I still believe there after about 6-3 advantages in strength start to give way to lever problems. The correlation to OBA and height in the page linked means perhaps really tall guys have to have great eyes, carefully pick their pitch to make up for/take advantage of longer arms.

 

[charlieoscar]

I think actual weight of players is a lot farther off than actual height. For example, BB-Ref lists Ted Williams as 205 pounds, yet he only weighed 170-175 when he started out and I suspect he was more than 205 by the time he retired. The Lahman database lists David Ortiz at 250 while BB-Ref has him at 230.
 
Heights aren't accurate; weights aren't accurate. About all you can say is that players today are bigger than players from earlier days. The really tall players today tend to go towards basketball; the heavy ones towards football, both sports that today pay "as well" as baseball, unlike the earlier days when it was basically just baseball. I don't mean this to be racist but aren't some of the genes that came out of Africa and parts of Asia responsible for increased height/weight? Also, there is better nutrition around the world.

 

[SumnerH]

 
I don't mean this to be racist but aren't some of the genes that came out of Africa and parts of Asia responsible for increased height/weight? Also, there is better nutrition around the world.

 
 
 
I don't know of any studies showing that Africans (for example) are "genetically taller" than Europeans--certainly the average height in Africa is significantly shorter than in most Western European countries (and I suspect all or most of Europe, but I'm not going to chase down the numbers right now), but there are so many environmental differences such as nutrition that it's tough to read anything into that.
 
Black Americans likewise tend to be (slightly) shorter than white Americans, but even there there are social/economic factors at play that could cause nutritional differences.  And the height difference is quite small.  Hispanic Americans do tend to be much shorter than both, but they're also much more likely to be recent immigrants and have international nutrition and such issues in play.
 
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf has some relevant data (see page 15, table 11 and the surrounding pages) but there are so many confounding effects it's tough to draw any real conclusions.
 
The question with weight is even more fraught because of the even more dramatic impact of environental/nutritional issues there.

 

[reggiecleveland]

I think the weight increases are real in that 30 years ago a guy that weighed north of 220 was probably fat and lied about it, now guys are buff and proud of it.
 
I have been at field level for a lot of MLB games and met guys at clinics, card shows. Generally guys lie to push them selves up to 6 feet when they are not, but the big dudes are pretty dead on. I stood by Ortiz, and at the time I was the same listed height and weight as him. We were the same height, but he was at least 260. Just a massive dude. I would bet Manny was more like 5-10 than 6-0. Guys lie when it they are undersized for their role. A 6-7 power forward will say he is 6-9. Pedroa will say he is 5-9, Manny will say he 6. But Cal Ripken really is 6-5, Jeter in his calm eyed glory was really 6-3.
 
I have heard rumblings the NFL wants guys much over 300 to keep the listed weight down since polling has shown people think about steroids, and freaks when they read 350.

 

[charlieoscar]

 
I don't know of any studies showing that Africans (for example) are "genetically taller" than Europeans--certainly the average height in Africa is significantly shorter than in most Western European countries (and I suspect all or most of Europe, but I'm not going to chase down the numbers right now), but there are so many environmental differences such as nutrition that it's tough to read anything into that.;;;

 
I was thinking of the Watusi but the Dinka people are also tall. Balancing that out the pygmy tribes such as the Mbenga and Mbuti, which may help explain why the average height in Africa is shorter than in most European countries. One would need to look at statistics of slave trade.
 
The Ainu from northern Japan are generally tall and are thought to have originated from people of mongoloid stock in northeast and central Asia. All I'm saying is that there are people around the world with genes that tend toward taller than average height.

 

[SumnerH]

 
I was thinking of the Watusi but the Dinka people are also tall. Balancing that out the pygmy tribes such as the Mbenga and Mbuti, which may help explain why the average height in Africa is shorter than in most European countries. One would need to look at statistics of slave trade.
 
The Ainu from northern Japan are generally tall and are thought to have originated from people of mongoloid stock in northeast and central Asia. All I'm saying is that there are people around the world with genes that tend toward taller than average height.

There are some differences, but they're often wildly overstated in the popular media. The Tutsi (formerly Watusi) average 5'8", for instance; taller than the nearby Hutu, who reportedly called them giants, but shorter than Dutchs or Swedes (to name just a couple). Or Americans, for that matter.

They did have a very tall ruling family for a while (some reputedly in the 6'6"+ range). The Dutch were famously short as recently as 1900, but are among the tallest countries now.

I'm not saying there isn't a difference, but it's pretty complicated to tease out and the idea that African Americans have some giant genetics is at least partially based in racial misconceptions and stereotypes (though again it may have some basis in fact, for some specific subgroups) and hard to separate from nutritional and other environmental factors.

https://remnantofgiants.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/tutsi-giants/

 

[charlieoscar]

Isn't there such a thing as a dominant gene? Who would slavers choose when they went to Africa? Perhaps the big and strong? Might not that lead to concentrating dominate genes, including ones for height? Then selective breeding practiced by some slave owners could even further concentrate dominant genes in the pool.
 
I don't know; it wasn't long after Crick and Watson's announcement of the double helix that I took biology and that science has changed far beyond my understanding, but I don't think my scenario is unreasonable.

 

[MentalDisabldLst]

Isn't there such a thing as a dominant gene? Who would slavers choose when they went to Africa? Perhaps the big and strong? Might not that lead to concentrating dominate genes, including ones for height? Then selective breeding practiced by some slave owners could even further concentrate dominant genes in the pool.
 
I don't know; it wasn't long after Crick and Watson's announcement of the double helix that I took biology and that science has changed far beyond my understanding, but I don't think my scenario is unreasonable.

 
 
You should read up on "Regression to the mean", then.
 
Height of African tribespeople was actually the basis of the original study, in the early 19th century, demonstrating regression-to-the-mean as a concept.  Go read up on Sir Francis Galton (I recommend the chapter devoted to him in the book Against The Gods).  To be brief: if you take a group of short people, the average height of their children will be taller than they are (but still shorter than the broad population average).  If you take a group of tall people, the average height of their children will be shorter than they are (but still taller than the broad population average).  To put it in Galton's words:
 

The child inherits partly from his parents, partly from his ancestry.  ...The further his genealogy goes back, the more numerous and varied will his ancestry become, until they cease to differ from any equally-numerous sample taken haphazard from the race at large.  This law tells heavily against the full hereditary transmission of any gift... The law is even-handed: it levies the same succession-tax on the transmission of badness as well as of goodness.  If it discourages the extravagant expectations of gifted parents that their children will inherit all their powers, it no less discountenances extravagant fears that they will inherit all their weaknesses and diseases.

 
Heredity of our height is partly influenced by our parents, but mostly controlled by the normal distribution and the fundamental nature of man, where our recent divisions of tribe and race (dating back a mere 30,000 years or so) are nothing compared to the millions of years of our shared genetic heritage.  Over the very long term, natural selection can shift that average height for our species if (and only if) it makes a difference in reproductive success.  The mere dozen generations since slaves were brought to America, meanwhile, is not even a blip on the evolutionary radar.  Today's African-Americans, I feel confident in asserting, have the same distribution of height as do everyone else, once you control for nutrition and disease.

 

[reggiecleveland]

I am away from my computer but Roger Bannister wrote something about genetics and sports. I thought a follow-up showed strongman competitors when DNA tested almost all had heritage back to Eastern Europe and Scandinavia or Samoa. The better they did in the contests the more noticeable the trend.

I think thekenyan marathon runners tended to be from a narrow genetic group too.

It was a bit beyond me but I think the idea was family not race. The theory that certain beneficial traits, small calf size, or advantageous leg to back length get passed on and if there was a period of isolation, an island, religious isolation, a mountain range, those traits can be stronger is some groups than others. The writer was quick to say this was not saying Kenya is unbeatable in distance running, nor was Iceland always going to have the best truck pullers, at this point in history the tiny majority of people that win those lotteries are more likely located in those places.
 
Edit Kenya not Nigeria.
Wait in which nation was Obama born?

 

[SumnerH]

I am away from my computer but Roger Bannister wrote something about genetics and sports. I thought a follow-up showed strongman competitors when DNA tested almost all had heritage back to Eastern Europe and Scandinavia or Samoa. The better they did in the contests the more noticeable the trend.

I think the Nigerian marathon runners tended to be from a narrow genetic group too.

It was a bit beyond me but I think the idea was family not race. The theory that certain beneficial traits, small calf size, or advantageous leg to back length get passed on and if there was a period of isolation, an island, religious isolation, a mountain range, those traits can be stronger is some groups than others. The writer was quick to say this was not saying Nigeria in it unbeatable in distance running, nor was Iceland always going to have the best truck pullers, at this point in history the tiny majority of people that win those lotteries are more likely located in those places.

http://run-down.com/guests/je_black_athletes_p2.php touches on some of this. 

 

[MentalDisabldLst]

Fine, but that's muscle-fiber ratios, not height.
 
These goalposts are moving at Usain Bolt-like speeds.

 

[charlieoscar]

How tall you are is strongly related to the genes you inherit, and previous studies suggested that as much as 80% of the variance in height among people is due to their DNA.
 
According to a study by the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits consortium, 423 genetic regions connected to height were identified— which could explain as much as 60% of that genetic component.
 
I was wrong in saying there is a height gene but what I suggested about pooling a group of people with a genetic proclivity to height I still think is valid.

 

[crystalline]

How tall you are is strongly related to the genes you inherit, and previous studies suggested that as much as 80% of the variance in height among people is due to their DNA.
 
According to a study by the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits consortium, 423 genetic regions connected to height were identified which could explain as much as 60% of that genetic component.
 
I was wrong in saying there is a height gene but what I suggested about pooling a group of people with a genetic proclivity to height I still think is valid.

Our understanding of genetics, especially as related to height, has been transforming over the past ten years or so. Lamarck, it turns out, wasn't totally wrong- its not just DNA that influences height in heritable ways. These other effects are called epigenetics. How much your parents ate, and how much their parents ate, can affect your height.
Here's a reasonable article:
http://bscb.org/learning-resources/softcell-e-learning/epigenetics-its-not-just-genes-that-make-us/