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Dialed In — Saturday, July 11, 2009Steve Austin is not a Baseball PlayerWe are NOT bigger, stronger and faster. I know that flies in the face of human progression, but many analysts forget the economies of developing countries when considering the growth of baseball. Yes, scouts do a better job in Latin America, both the Caribbean and South America, and Latin America (which in grade school I learned was Mexico and the myriad of countries between Mexico and South America. Of course, that was 1974, and that may be completely inappropriate these days.) Every analyst is quick to point out that baseball is better these days because we draw from a larger talent pool, and that athletes are bigger, faster and stronger in other sports. Both of those things are true in general, however, they have a point of conflict. Yes, we, in the US have benefited from a better diet and healthcare system since World War II. For that matter, a few million extra kids were born from 1946-1964 to only enhance the baseball talent pool from the USA. Also, once Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, teams could more freely use Latin American players, and many did, picking up players like Luis Aparicio and Roberto Clemente. But even then these players were still like the gaijin in Japan: a few players per team. However, the age of the 1960s changed the culture of America, and the influx of minority players increased dramatically. That has continued to this day, as the ratio of white US players to minority player has decreased significantly. It is easy, and sloppy, to say “athletes are bigger, stronger and faster” than they were 30 or 50 years ago. Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals in the 1972 Summer Olympics, had times that college women can beat today. [Ed. Note: not quite] Javelin and discus throws are longer. Sprinting races (100m, 200m) are done much faster than in the past. All of these events lead people to conclude that MLB players MUST be “bigger, stronger and faster”. If baseball, MLB, were as lily-white as it was in 1946, then I might be inclined to agree. But it isn’t. The percentage of minority players has grown dramatically since 1947. As the search for more talented players has grown, and the net is cast wider, we gather in players of all sizes and skills. And what we learn is that as the minority population of MLB grows, the *size* of MLB players *decreases*. It’d be nice to emphasize that enough, but I do not believe I can. As MLB uses a greater talent pool, the size of the players decreases. Were MLB to stick with US-born players for the last 50 years (going by birth date), the average player, born after 1964, would be 73.76 inches and weigh 197 pounds. But they do not, and I believe we are all in agreement that the talent of MLB is better off for expanding the talent pool and drawing on players from all cultures. Just using the Latin American countries (Caribbean, South America and Mainland Latin America), we see that the average of LA players (born after 1964) is 72.54 inches and 184 pounds. That size and weight coincides with players that *debuted* from 1950-1954 (and were born some 20 years before). This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a tremendous surprise. The socio-economic conditions of the countries often approaches the US in the 1930s. The size of the players is reflective of that. Does that mean the quality of their play if equal to that of the 1950s? Absolutely not. They play on better fields and have better equipment, and since joining an MLB team are better fed with better healthcare. What it absolutely does mean is that today’s players are NOT “bigger, stronger, faster”. Yes, many of them are, but the influx of foreign players lessens that every day. The fact of the matter is that MLB is getting *smaller*. Players making their debut from 1990-1994 averaged 73.46 inches and 193 pounds. Players that made their debut from 1995-1999 averaged 73.44 inches and 192 pounds. You may shrug and say that’s nothing (and maybe it is, because the database is older now), but the only two other times the sizes dropped were during WWI and WWII. That isn’t something we have these days, so for even the tiniest drop to occur is significant. In a nutshell, MLB is getting smaller, not bigger. Maybe it is getting faster and stronger (highly unlikely), but it is NOT getting bigger. So the next time someone wants to assert that a player today is better than a player from yesteryear, do not accept that players are bigger, stronger and faster than then - because they aren’t. You can read more about the changes in the game and players in these older articles, here and here.
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Not true. Any and all of Spitz's times in 1972 are superior to the speed of the corresponding female gold medalist performances in the 2008 summer Olympics.
It'd be interesting to see the height and weight comparisons broken down by position, especially for pitchers.
I don't find Dial's argument convincing. I don't believe weight/height statistics are even reasonably accurate in the modern sense. They may or may not be accurate historicly, I don't know. But I do know that:
Dustin Pedroia is NOT 5 9
David Ortiz is NOT 230
Arod is NOT 190
Melky Cabrera is NOT 170
CC is NOT 250
The only other player I looked up was Petite, but his weight list at 230 seemed pretty reasonable. I suspected before checking that these guys information wouldn't be accurate. The data is just garbage and is leading to inaccurate analysis.
Wait, if you're granting that the US players are bigger, and you're showing me that the Latin American guys are the size of the representative population from 50-54, then by necessity players *are* bigger. If the argument were more focused on why that doesn't matter, okay, but I don't get it as is.
The fact of the matter is that MLB is getting *smaller*. Players making their debut from 1990-1994 averaged 73.46 inches and 193 pounds. Players that made tehir debut from 1995-1999 averaged 73.44 inches and 192 pounds.
Come on. Really?
One caveat about height listings that's impossible to prove but easy to be suspicious of: Height inflation, especially for players listed at exactly 6'0". It's always seemed more than a little fishy to me to see so many players listed at exactly 6'0" and so few at 5'11". But of course that's a suspicion that has no way of being proven one way or the other.
Both of these Indians teams were historic. The 1954 team, overrated as it may be, nevertheless won 111 games, while the 1995 team went 100-44 in a strike-shortened year and won their division by a record-smashing 30 games.
1954 Cleveland Indians
1995 Cleveland Indians
Two Yankees World Series winners:
1956 Yankees
1996 Yankees
Two Braves World Series winners:
1957 Milwaukee Braves
1995 Atlanta Braves
Two historic Red Sox teams:
1967 Red Sox
2007 Red Sox
And finally, two Cardinals World Series winners:
1964 Cardinals
2006 Cardinals
No way I'm going to do the complete math on these teams, but one thing that seems obvious: If you combined all the players on these ten rosters and listed them according to height, the great majority of those on the tall end of the scale would be from the "modern" teams. 50 or 60 years ago pitchers who were 6'6" or more were so uncommon that we could practically name them all: Ewell Blackwell, Gene Conley, Frank Sullivan, and who else? Whereas today 6'6" or more, while still a long way from the norm (duh), is so commonplace that nobody even notices it any more until you get up into Randy Johnson territory.
1956 Yankees
Put on a pair of skates, and try to do a triple axel. Or, try to do an Iron Cross on a pair of gymnastics rings.
Gymnastics and figure skating are actually examples of how modern athletes are stronger, more athletic, at least relative to their bodyweights.
The number of jumps, has increased quite a bit in recent years, especially in women's figure skating. The Triple Axel which has now become a standard jump for male skaters, was only first successfully landed in competition in 1978. It is only in recent years that (a few) women have started being able to land Triple Axels in competition.
In men's gymnastics, compared to the past, male gymnasts nowadays perform the Iron Cross in a single routine, one of the most difficult sporting movements in any sport, more times.
Women can now do triple axels? The last one I remember was Tonya Harding. Michelle Kwan wasn't able to do them, nor Sarah Hughes.
1958 NL
Banks 6-1 180
Mays 5-11 180
Aaron 6-0 180
Frank Thomas 6-3 205
Musial 6-0 175
Harry Anderson (Phillies) 6-3 210
Cepeda 6-2 210
Frank Robinson 6-1 195
Ken Boyer 6-2 200
Walt Moryn 6-2 205
1958 AL
Colavito 6-3 190
Bob Cerv 6-0 202
Mantle 5-11 198
Williams 6-3 205
Sievers 6-1 195
Jensen 5-11 190
Kaline 6-2 180
Power 5-11 195
Minoso 5-10 175
Gail Harris (Tigers) 6-0 195
2008 NL
Pujols 6-3 210
Ryan Ludwick 6-3 203
Chipper 6-3 185
Berkman 6-1 205
Braun 6-2 200
Carlos Lee 6-2 235
Howard 6-4 230
Hanley Ramirez 6-3 195
Holliday 6-4 235
Utley 6-1 170
2008 AL
A-Rod 6-3 190
Quentin 6-1 225
Youk 6-1 220
Milton Bradley 6-0 180
Huff 6-4 221
Dye 6-4 210
Mig. Cabrera 6-2 185
Longoria 6-2 210
Josh Hamilton 6-4 203
Vlad. Guerrero 6-3 235
Another imperfect sample size, but the upward trend is obvious. Nearly all the biggest players are from 2008, and nearly all the smallest ones are from 1958.
And as to the admittedly small sample size: When people say that players are getting bigger as the years go by, does anyone really doubt that they're talking about the players with the most playing time, and especially about the sluggers and the pitchers, as opposed to the middle infielders and the benchwarmers?
The talent pool is larger now than ever before. It follows that the cream of a bigger crop will be better than it was. Has MLB expanded quickly enough to keep up with the explosion of available players, players from Latin America, players from Asia, players from the United States itself, which has grown to nearly twice the size it was in 1960? I highly doubt it. There were 16 teams in the major leagues in the 1950s, drawing talent almost exclusively from the United States and Canada, fewer than two hundred million people. Now there are thirty, drawing from a baseball-playing population of well over half a billion worldwide. The level of skill, the variety of ability, has almost certainly risen, too. This article makes no meaningful arguments against that.
This is the same Hanley Ramirez that BA rated among the top 40 prospects in all of baseball for 4 straight years?
As to the larger point, it all depends on what you mean by "as one would expect." If you mean there' a small benefit of some slowly developing players being given more time to develop, sure. If you mean this small benefit comes anywhere near outweighing the inevitable talent dilution caused by expansion, it's completely wrong. Expanding the talent pool internationally and through domestic population growth balances that out to a large degree, but not because there are a few Donnellys hanging around the independent leagues.
Your assertion that "almost certainly has risen" isn't an argument. Make that one, and I'll argue against it.
Among the top 20 1958 sluggers, there are four of them who are 6-3, and none taller.
Among the top 20 2008 sluggers, there are eleven who are either 6-3 (6) or 6-4 (5).
Among the top 20 1958 sluggers, there are nine players who are 6-0 or shorter.
Among the top 20 2008 sluggers, there is but one---Milt Bradley.
I can't believe that discrepancies that large are insignificant.
As everyone has noted, none of this has anything to do with skill sets, because as you say, Steve Austin is not a baseball player, and there's more to baseball skills than sheer size. But among the top players, at least, the size is definitely bigger than it was 40 and 50 years ago.
**of course I have access to this information myself (it's all there in BB-ref and BB Almanac), but what I don't have is a program that can get me averages and splits for 50 years worth of teams without spending half a month doing it.
There is also twice as many players drafted. In a smaller leaguer, there is no Mike Piazza or countless others.
[quoteOf course it isn't. The flaws in the size reported by athletes has been pretty consistently goofy (at least over the last 40 years). You also seem to say that these players are shorter than reported, so they are even smaller. The data is going to err, most likely, in a consistent manner in the size of the sample I am looking at.]
One player out of 4 that I cited off the top of my team was shorter. The others are significantly larger than there reported size. You can't just poo poo the data integrity issue like your trying to do here. It is possible that it is systematically bias, but as the scientist aren't you supposed to prove that rather than assert it?
Steve Austin did in fact play baseball, for the Mariners under the name Jay Buhner.
Why? If the averages are what they are, then it would mean there are more smaller ones too. It's the average.
So you're saying that if there are more outliers on the tall end, that will be balanced by more outliers on the short end, if "the averages are what they are."
Well, as I said, you've got the programs, and all I have is what raw info I have the time or inclination to process.
But those Baseball Almanac rosters aren't just made up of the mid-Summer players. They include everyone who made even just one plate or mound appearance during the regular season. And to go back to those five sets of rosters I listed in # 8 & # 9, here's a count of the number of sub-6'0" outliers, and the number of 6'4" or taller outliers.
1954 Indians: nine under 6 ft.; one 6'4" or taller
1995 Indians: seven under 6 ft.; seven 6'4" or taller
1956 Yankees: ten under 6 ft.; two 6'4" or taller
1996 Yankees: six under 6 ft.; ten 6'4" or taller
1957 Braves: five under 6 ft.; five 6'4" or taller
1995 Braves: eight under 6 ft.; six 6'4" or taller
1967 Red Sox: six under 6 ft.; five 6'4" or taller
2007 Red Sox: three under 6 ft.; nine 6'4" or taller
1964 Cardinals: thirteen under 6 ft.; two 6'4" or taller
2006 Cardinals: seven under 6 ft.; nine 6'4" or taller
Total number of earlier players under 6 ft.: 43
Total number of recent players under 6 ft.: 31
Total number of earlier players 6'4" or taller: 15
Total number of recent players 6'4" or taller: 41
The trends in both cases seem pretty cut and dried. And they don't jibe with your "averages."
Either those randomly picked rosters I selected are wildly unrepresentative, or I'd like to see some other sets of randomly picked rosters whose numbers point in the other direction. What's your data base? And if you can manage to come up with one big "average" from all of those rosters, why can't you simply produce a list of tall and short outliers, obviously meaning a total number and not a list of names. Until then, I'm having a tough time ascribing those above discrepancies to "small sample size."
Perhaps my bias lies in selecting outstandingly good teams, and perhaps if I'd chosen outstandingly bad teams the numbers would more reflect your findings that players are getting shorter. That would suggest a correlation between size and quality, which may or may not be correct. But I'll leave that bit of digging and / or theorizing to someone else, if anyone's interested. And I'll leave the racial or ethnic explanations to others as well.
I thought this was my point, that there are sports where just being bigger and stronger are not an advantage. Smaller and stronger, or smaller and same strength, or same size and stronger are the advantage, power to weight ratio if you will, instead of pure strength.
ANd what we have is grossly inaccurate in at least one part of the sample. Since we have no idea if the bias is systematic or not, the data is poor for this type of analysis. GIGO.
I am not disputing that at all. Here I am saying that the influx of Latin American players that are of the same size as players from three or four generations ago aren't bigger than them, and thus it cannot be argued (convincingly) that play is better solely because the average size is increased. Many of the "better players" aren't bigger - and the percentage of players that aren't bigger is increasing.
Players and play may be better - I am not arguing it isn't. I'm saying th argument for claiming a superstar today is better than a superstar of the past needs better demonstration than "bigger faster stronger" because it isn't that simple and often not true.
One of the little oddities of listings of famous players is that Lou Brock has no height at all listed in any of the references I've seen. If you asked me to guess how tall he is, I might guess 5-11.
I checked 6 players off the top of my head. 5 were clearly and obviously wrong. There is no reason why they should be exceptions. Since you have the data in a spreadsheet. Run a =rand() in each row from each player from last year. Sort it by that row. Look at the top 10, tell me how many of those 10 are reasonable. I'll do the same.
If you had said this right here, I'd have been fine. "Players aren't getting bigger, and they always have, that might mean something." I'm 100% okay with that. But I submit that even with the sample sizes the sizes that they are, a difference of 2/100ths of an inch and 1 pound out of 170 doesn't pass a t test for significance wrt difference between the two means. You've got the data in Excel already, can you run it?
Sounds like he needs to be picking Jenny Craig, am I right?
OH NO HE DI'INT
(No offense, Matt, that's for Spivey)
Missed this:
Jeff, I think Dial's point is that the full populations average size is smaller because the growing global presence has a larger contribution to the populations average size than the size increase of the American born players.
Matt, I don't think that's his point because that doesn't match up with what he provides. As I said, if the notion is that there's a bunch more Latins in baseball and they offset some of the growth in Amerians, okay. But saying that they are the same size as the league-norm in the 50s obviously doesn't prove that. If we take the 50s average size and we have Americans that are bigger now and Latins that are smaller than the new Americans but the same size as the 50s Americans, no amount of increase in the number of Latins can make it such that players as a whole are not bigger now than then.
This isn't the First Bank of Change.
By definition, or all the time? Of course not. You don't need a study to prove that, it's common sense, and well-known. There is a point at which height starts to hinder, and not just because of the strike zone impact. You hear it every time Russ Branyan comes up, or when Winfield did. That long a swing is a hard thing to master. Same thing with stronger. Hell, that's so entrenched it's basically the entire reason that nobody weightlifted until the late 70s, the notion that big muscles don't serve a baseball swing.
When the sample is 100% of the population, what would a t test tell us?
The pitchers of today are bigger than the pitchers of 50 years ago. There are more oversized pitchers and fewer undersized ones than there were back then, unless those five teams I compared are utterly unrepresentative.
And yet somehow the overall size of players is getting smaller? Then who's dragging the averages down? Are the catchers smaller? I strongly doubt that. Maybe the middle infielders, since that's where you find a lot of Latinos. But those team roster comparisons I listed included middle infielders, and the overall rosters all showed greater height and weight.
In any case, this alleged shrinkage has to be coming from somewhere. But where? (/Seinfeld straight line)
Is it? It seems to be cited regularly that today's players are better than those in the 1950s (or 1960s) because they are BFS.
Yet you yourself have argued the opposite on more than one occasion. You've always said that timing and bat speed were the keys. (And for the record, I've always agreed that while timing is the sine qua non of hitting, if you've got that to begin with, then up to a point you'll get more power [more bat speed] from more strength.)
Did I use the wrong term? I forget the differences exactly, I was a finance major, not stats. Whichever one is the one where you start with a hypothesis that the mean of population A is not different than the mean of population B and you have to disprove the null hypothesis. Isn't that a two-sample t-test?
I think there's a semantic difference here. I think it is cited regularly that the level of play is higher (better might bring in some aesthetic connotations, hell I might enjoy Benny Hill and so "better" to me is 50 errors a game) because of BFS, not so much the value judgment on the players themselves. I know it's subtle, and actually so this time, but I think it's important. I might be wrong, but that's my impression of what I've read.
I was going to make a Sean Kemp joke here, but then I realized it worked equally well for either his actual weight or the combined weight of his children, and would thus be confusing.
Good point, though. Not the least of which is that today's players aren't out working the back 40 or delivering milk in the offseason. They get more time to stay sharp, but they're not out busting their hump like Joe Schmo, either.
We need season values. That way we can do what we want with it, like batting average or era.
Thats because the data is bad. Though superficially, I think it makes some sense as players weight train throughout there career. At least corner player, which was frowned upon prior to Brian Downing, iirc.
I'm saying that in most sports, including athletics, swimming, not just "skill" sports like figure skating or gymnastics, relative strength is key, since in many cases the resistance is the athlete's body; or there are weight class limits.
In the last few years, a couple Japanese and an American, Kimmie Meissner. Neither Kwan nor Hughes were known for their athleticism. Meissner, and Asada are.
And that article you link to is so full of holes I can't imagine that anyone would take it seriously, at least once you get below the top two choices of boxing and hockey. For one thing, there's no subcategory that takes into consideration the essential difference between sports where the defense is actively interfering with the offense, as opposed to sports where the participant is competing only against the course (golf) or himself (gymnastics).
So HEC is definitely a huge part of it, but it would be no matter whether HEC was the most important determining factor in hitting success or not. Where HEC being the most important determining factor (if it indeed is) factor comes into play is elsewhere, I think.
(EDIT) This is to 63.
I wonder if your endpoints in the 1990s are biased by replacement players in 1995. The height of players who debuted that single year was 73.26. If you compare heights of players debuting in 1990-94 versus 1996-2000, the average height increases from 73.46 to 73.59 inches. For debuts from 2000 on, the average height is 73.65 inches. But I doubt that is exactly the right way to address the question. Because of increased specialization on pitching staffs, and maybe changed rules for DL'ing players, more players get to play some MLB ball, especially pitchers. I think you'd want to weight the heights by some measure of playing time, not simply average the players who appear.
Your core observation is an interesting one. Foreign born players are around an inch shorter on average. But their height has also been increasing, just like the average heights of American born players. [For players born 1945-64, I get an average height of 72.1 for players born outside the US, and 73.3 in the US. for players born after 1964, the averages are 72.8 and 73.8.] The increased presence of foreign born players is "pulling down" the average height, but it looks like this trend hasn't quite cancelled out the trend toward increased height.
I would stay away from using weight in a discussion like this, because I'd guess it is harder to have an apples to apples comparison. A player's weight changes over time, but the Lahman database only lists a single weight. For very recent players it appears to get updated and more or less represent a career ending weight. But I don't know that you can assume that about the weights listed for players from 20 or more years ago ... I see AROM already alluded to this in #56.
.
% of players % of players
height (in) 1950-1955 2000-2005
<66 0.5% 0.0%
66 0.3% 0.0%
67 0.6% 0.2%
68 1.9% 0.8%
69 3.4% 2.1%
70 7.0% 4.8%
71 14.4% 8.4%
72 23.3% 14.1%
73 17.5% 16.5%
74 13.3% 18.4%
75 9.2% 14.5%
76 5.8% 9.6%
77 1.6% 6.5%
78 0.6% 2.2%
>78 0.3% 1.7%
Note: In the 1950-1955 group, there are some players with no listed height in the database.
I basically agree with these comments. Weighing by PT would be interesting, but is somewhat hard to do with the format that I have my data in. Maybe Chris has it in a better format.
I will also add that I think only looking at the average height obscures a lot of what has actually happened. Roughly 10% of MLB players who first show up in the Lahman DB between 2000 and 2005 are 6'5" or taller. For the 1950-1955 time frame, this percentage is about 2.5%.
.
US born Non US born
height (in) % of all players % of all players
65 0.0% 0.0%
66 0.0% 0.0%
67 0.2% 0.1%
68 0.6% 0.2%
69 1.1% 1.0%
70 2.7% 2.1%
71 4.5% 3.9%
72 10.4% 3.7%
73 11.1% 5.4%
74 13.3% 5.1%
75 11.6% 2.9%
76 8.1% 1.5%
77 5.7% 0.7%
78 2.1% 0.2%
>78 1.7% 0.1%
Total % 73.1% 26.9%
Latin American players I believe are bigger now then LA players of 50 years ago. White players are bigger now then they were 50 years ago. Black players are bigger now then they were 50 years ago.
yearID Height
1871 66.0
1872 66.0
1873 66.0
1911 69.6
1912 69.9
1913 69.6
1914 70.2
1915 69.6
1916 71.0
1917 69.8
1918 69.4
1919 69.5
1920 68.7
1921 68.4
1922 67.2
1923 67.0
1924 71.5
1925 70.9
1926 69.2
1927 70.4
1928 70.6
1929 70.9
1930 67.0
1931 69.6
1932 68.9
1933 68.4
1934 69.3
1935 71.1
1936 70.8
1937 72.0
1938 71.8
1939 70.6
1940 70.1
1941 71.4
1942 70.2
1943 70.3
1944 71.4
1945 70.5
1946 70.6
1947 69.3
1948 69.1
1949 70.8
1950 71.1
1951 70.3
1952 70.0
1953 70.6
1954 70.6
1955 71.7
1956 71.0
1957 71.1
1958 71.0
1959 70.9
1960 71.4
1961 71.2
1962 71.3
1963 71.0
1964 71.2
1965 71.0
1966 71.2
1967 71.2
1968 71.1
1969 71.2
1970 71.4
1971 71.1
1972 71.3
1973 71.5
1974 71.5
1975 71.6
1976 71.9
1977 72.0
1978 72.0
1979 72.1
1980 71.8
1981 72.1
1982 72.2
1983 72.2
1984 72.3
1985 72.2
1986 72.3
1987 72.1
1988 72.2
1989 72.2
1990 72.2
1991 72.1
1992 72.1
1993 72.5
1994 72.3
1995 72.3
1996 72.3
1997 72.4
1998 72.5
1999 72.5
2000 72.4
2001 72.5
2002 72.4
2003 72.4
2004 72.5
2005 72.4
2006 72.5
2007 72.5
2008 72.5
And by decade
Height
1870 66.0
1910 69.9
1920 69.8
1930 70.7
1940 70.6
1950 70.9
1960 71.2
1970 71.6
1980 72.2
1990 72.3
2000 72.5
yearID Height
1871 68.6
1872 68.8
1873 68.8
1874 69.0
1875 69.1
1876 69.3
1877 69.1
1878 69.3
1879 69.0
1880 69.3
1881 69.5
1882 69.4
1883 69.4
1884 69.3
1885 69.5
1886 69.6
1887 69.6
1888 69.8
1889 69.7
1890 69.9
1891 69.9
1892 69.9
1893 70.0
1894 69.8
1895 69.8
1896 69.9
1897 70.0
1898 69.9
1899 69.9
1900 70.0
1901 69.8
1902 69.9
1903 70.0
1904 70.1
1905 70.1
1906 70.3
1907 70.3
1908 70.4
1909 70.5
1910 70.4
1911 70.5
1912 70.6
1913 70.5
1914 70.4
1915 70.6
1916 70.8
1917 70.6
1918 70.5
1919 70.6
1920 70.6
1921 70.5
1922 70.5
1923 70.5
1924 70.5
1925 70.6
1926 70.7
1927 70.9
1928 71.0
1929 71.0
1930 71.2
1931 71.2
1932 71.2
1933 71.4
1934 71.5
1935 71.5
1936 71.5
1937 71.6
1938 71.6
1939 71.7
1940 71.7
1941 71.7
1942 71.7
1943 71.7
1944 71.7
1945 71.6
1946 71.9
1947 71.8
1948 71.9
1949 71.9
1950 72.0
1951 72.0
1952 72.1
1953 72.1
1954 72.3
1955 72.3
1956 72.4
1957 72.4
1958 72.5
1959 72.4
1960 72.6
1961 72.5
1962 72.6
1963 72.6
1964 72.8
1965 72.8
1966 72.7
1967 72.7
1968 72.8
1969 72.8
1970 72.7
1971 72.7
1972 72.7
1973 72.7
1974 72.7
1975 72.8
1976 72.8
1977 72.8
1978 72.9
1979 72.9
1980 72.9
1981 72.9
1982 73.0
1983 73.0
1984 73.1
1985 73.1
1986 73.1
1987 73.1
1988 73.1
1989 73.1
1990 73.1
1991 73.1
1992 73.1
1993 73.2
1994 73.1
1995 73.1
1996 73.2
1997 73.2
1998 73.3
1999 73.3
2000 73.3
2001 73.3
2002 73.3
2003 73.3
2004 73.3
2005 73.4
2006 73.5
2007 73.6
2008 73.6
And by decade
Dec Height
1870 69.0
1880 69.5
1890 69.9
1900 70.1
1910 70.6
1920 70.7
1930 71.4
1940 71.8
1950 72.3
1960 72.7
1970 72.8
1980 73.0
1990 73.2
2000 73.4
Re: The incompleteness of the Lahman db
Right. My concern is that this would be biasing the results. That is why I pointed it out when I posted my table. If the Lahman database contains a biased sample, then we have some problems using it. If the sample is pretty much random, then we ought to be in better shape.
More problematic is if players heights are systematically misrepresented in the database. Perhaps very tall players 50 years ago were reporting much shorter heights, because being tall might have been considered a disadvantage.
Still, about 10% of the players in the 2000-2005 group are listing at 6'5" or taller. The results compared with the 1950-1955 group are so different, that the Lahman database would have to be very inaccurate to change our general conclusion that there a greater percentage of tall players playing today, and a lower percentage short players playing. Even if we mistrust the database somewhat, we still are going to conclude this. The database would have to be very bad for us to discard this general conclusion.
.......
Re: the rounding issue
This doesn't bother me at all. While it is possible to measure height with a great degree of precision, how often is this actually done? The difference between being 76 inches and 76.5 inches for an individual height is pretty much within the error of the measurement. Again, the differences that you can extract from the data are larger than this. In the 1950-1955 group the most common height is 72 inches, whereas in the 2000-2005 group the most common height is 74 inches. At the tall end of the distribution, the differences between the two groups are quite large.
If players of yesteryear were smaller than they are today then players of yesteryear are likely to have more 5'11.5" players than nowadays. On the flipside players of nowadays are likely to have more 6'0.4" tall players than players of yesteryear. In otherwords it is likely due to the rounding error that the height difference between players of then and now is actually greater than what is being reported. That might be true or it might all even out. We simply don't know.
Sure. This is pretty reasonable, but I would also guess that this is going to be a pretty small effect. It probably isn't enough to move the average height by much more than a small fraction of an inch. It would be a pretty straightforward (but rather tedious) exercise to estimate how big this effect might be. You would just need to assume a "true" underlying height distribution to see how much the rounding off to whole inches affects the average, and do some sort of weighted sampling of players from that distribution. (Not sure that you could do this in a purely analytical sense; a Monte Carlo approach would be easier to do.) You could play around with some different reasonable distributions. Again, I would expect this to be a second order effect that gets washed out by other things in the analysis of actual data.
This basically agrees with my height distribution table. Below I compare the US born players with debuts between 1950-1955 with non-US born players with 2000-2005 debuts. I am listing this based on % of the total number of players in each group (US born with 50-55 debut and non US born with 00-05 debut).
.
1950-1955 2000-2005
height % of US born % of ROW born
<66 0.4% 0.0%
66 0.2% 0.0%
67 0.5% 0.3%
68 1.4% 0.9%
69 3.3% 3.7%
70 7.0% 7.7%
71 13.5% 14.5%
72 23.0% 13.9%
73 18.2% 20.1%
74 13.9% 18.8%
75 9.6% 10.8%
76 6.3% 5.6%
77 1.6% 2.8%
78 0.7% 0.6%
>78 0.4% 0.3%
Total 100.00% 100.00%
The non-US born group has a funny shaped distribution. Not sure if this is just a sample size effect. In general these two groups look to be pretty similar in height distribution. Both groups lack a large percentage of very tall outliers.
For my 1950-55 sample, there are a total of 687 players. 617 have listed heights, so we are missing results on 10.2% of the players. There are 632 US born players in the group, and heights are missing on 9.8% of them. There are 55 players in the non-US born group, with heights missing on 14.5% of them. So here we have a small source of bias in the old data. We would expect that the average heights derived from the Lahman database for this 1950-55 group is slightly greater than what the actual heights would have been, given that we are slightly underreporting non-US born players, who tend to be shorter.
That said, I don't think this is a big deal, because if non-US born players were reported as the same rate as the US born ones, it would only add about 3 extra guys to the dataset used to produce the distribution tables.
The key here is that LA players are taking playing time from their significantly larger US counterparts. That, to me, definitely says BFS isn't the answer. Baseball is a skills game.
Are the 1970s US-born players better than the 2000s non-US born players? Why or why not?
Yes, the US born players are in their prime while the non-US born players haven't even hit puberty yet.
See Chris, you have a point, but you keep overstating it and forcing me to disagree with you. LA players getting playing time, which means (kind of) taking it away from US players who are on the average bigger, doesn't show that "BFS isn't the answer."
1) You don't need it to show that "BFS isn't the answer", as I pointed out earlier in #49.
2) BFS is the answer, for the majority of cases. There are outliers like I mentioned that easily prove the negation of "always better to be bigger and stronger", but on the whole it is a good thing.
3) Unless by "the answer" you mean the end-all be-all. No, it isn't that. Neither is anything else. That's not shocking.
4) The caveat to #2 is "all other things equal", which you're ignoring completely.
BFS is a good thing. It is not the only good thing about a player. As such, other factors can outweigh it. The fact that LA players get playing time doesn't disprove anything, all that it proves is that situation-specific details such as actual baseball talent, intelligence, character, and whatever are weighed more heavily than generic height/weight data splits by country of birth when teams evaluate players. That better not be news to anyone.
Baseball is more of a skills game than most other major sports, but your absolute is just as wrong as the one you're not attacking, but should be. Unless you want to lump the manifestation of skills affected by height and strength in to this category, and if you want to do that I have no idea what we're even talking about anymore. Certainly you'd agree on the whole that it's better to be tall in basketball. You might even agree that basketball is not "a skills game". I have the impression that the average Euro recruited into the league in the last 10-12 years, with a few exceptions, is smaller than the US NBA population. Does that prove basketball is a skills game, and that BFS isn't "the answer" in the NBA? If you answer yes to that, what's the point of this? "Sport skill/heigh and weight table do not have correlation of 1" can't be what you're going for.
I don't know all of basketball history, but I recall hearing once that the 1980s were the tallest era.
It is a good thing. What it cannot be is that: today's players are better because they are BFS. You have said this a few times" Unless by "the answer" you mean the end-all be-all. No, it isn't that. Neither is anything else. That's not shocking." My issue is it is argued that way.
There is no "all other things equal". When one thing changes, other things change. When you see an argument about why today's players are better than the 1970s players the answer is "because of BFS". *THAT* is the given reason, and not anything further (AFAICR). So, while you say it isn't shocking, it's a standard argument. Look at steroid arguments: player gets more muscle - poof, he's a better player. It simply isn't that simple.
I have lost track of what your position is. Which of these describe what you are arguing? (More than one answer might fit.)
1. Today's players are not "BFS" than the players of (a) 20 years ago, (b) 30 years ago, (c) 40 years ago.
2. "BFS" does not necessarily improve the level of play in baseball. (I am pretty sure that you are arguing this.)
I haven't looked at the numbers for heights in the 80's. Maybe I can do this when I get back from the store. But in the numbers that I posted above, it is pretty clear that players debuting from 1950-55 were much shorter than the ones from 2000-2005. I haven't attempted to weight by playing time, of course. I can mess around with this later.
.
height (in) 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000-2005
<66 0.5% 0.2% 0.2% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
66 0.0% 0.2% 0.0% 0.3% 0.3% 0.0%
67 0.0% 1.0% 0.4% 0.2% 0.8% 0.3%
68 1.9% 2.2% 1.8% 1.9% 1.2% 1.6%
69 5.9% 3.6% 5.3% 5.2% 4.1% 4.8%
70 9.4% 11.3% 10.7% 7.2% 9.8% 8.8%
71 16.4% 13.9% 16.3% 16.2% 13.1% 12.8%
72 25.1% 22.6% 23.5% 19.2% 19.8% 18.4%
73 17.3% 17.8% 14.4% 17.3% 16.6% 16.3%
74 11.3% 16.6% 14.2% 15.7% 15.4% 17.6%
75 7.0% 6.5% 9.7% 10.1% 9.5% 10.7%
76 3.8% 3.2% 2.5% 4.2% 6.2% 5.1%
77 0.5% 0.4% 0.6% 2.3% 2.4% 2.9%
78 0.3% 0.0% 0.4% 0.2% 0.0% 0.5%
>78 0.5% 0.4% 0.0% 0.0% 0.8% 0.3%
---------------------------------------------------------------
Total 371 495 514 573 662 375
%>74 in 12.1% 10.5% 13.2% 16.8% 18.9% 19.5%
% >75 in 5.1% 4.0% 3.5% 6.6% 9.4% 8.8%
% >76 in 1.3% 0.8% 1.0% 2.4% 3.2% 3.7%
.
height (in) 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000-2005
<66 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
66 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
67 0.6% 0.0% 0.2% 0.0% 0.1% 0.0%
68 1.3% 0.5% 0.2% 0.2% 0.0% 0.2%
69 1.0% 1.0% 1.1% 1.1% 1.0% 0.0%
70 5.7% 3.2% 2.6% 2.3% 1.3% 0.9%
71 12.4% 8.3% 5.2% 3.3% 4.5% 4.8%
72 19.4% 19.3% 11.9% 12.0% 12.3% 11.5%
73 17.2% 15.9% 15.4% 16.8% 15.0% 15.7%
74 17.5% 20.5% 18.4% 18.5% 22.7% 19.2%
75 11.5% 14.6% 21.4% 18.7% 17.7% 18.9%
76 10.2% 9.0% 11.5% 15.1% 11.5% 13.4%
77 1.3% 5.4% 8.2% 6.3% 7.9% 8.3%
78 1.3% 2.0% 2.4% 3.3% 3.2% 3.7%
>78 0.6% 0.5% 1.5% 2.3% 2.8% 3.2%
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Total 314 410 462 523 713 433
%>74 in 24.8% 31.5% 45.0% 45.7% 43.1% 47.6%
% >75 in 13.4% 16.8% 23.6% 27.0% 25.4% 28.6%
% >76 in 3.2% 7.8% 12.1% 11.9% 13.9% 15.2%
1. If you are less than 5'8", your MLB career prospects are not good. MLB players as a whole are actually pretty tall. Taller than I thought they would be, at least.
2. Roughly 45% of the pitchers debuting after 1970 meeting the minimum IP requirement are 6'3" or taller. This number, while fluctuating some, has remained roughly constant since the 1970's.
3. The percentage of position players that are 6'3" or taller meeting the minimum AB requirement appears to have been growing steadily since the 1980's. (Maybe it is currently at a plateau. Too soon to tell.)
So we are seeing an increase in the % of very tall position players since the 1970's, but the fraction of very tall pitchers has hardly changed over the last 30 or so years. Pretty weird.
Well, the "all other things equal" bit was bringing it out to the level of thought experiment without bogging down with actual players and whatever might come of that. I'll grant you the point that you usually see BFS as a reason named, the first reason, and if there's only one, it'll usually be it. I think that's the result of it really being a main reason. I think people, maybe not the average Joe but the guy doing analysis, often stop with that when they realize there's more to it. I don't know, perhaps you're right.
Dr. I, I think we're having three discussions here:
1) Are players bigger now than they were? This is undoubtedly yes. This has carried through from my #6 all the way to now, but there's not much actual dispute here, other than Dial standing by his comparison of late 90s vs. early 90s, and that was a long time ago.
2) Does BFS mean more skilled players? Does it mean a better game? These are two different arguments, but they're linked. I think it means more skilled/higher level, but better is aesthetic. I'm big on seeing the highest skill level out there for some sports, not for others. I don't like college hockey, I prefer the NHL. I have a huge preference for NCAA BB over the NBA, a slight but noted preference for FB over the NFL. College baseball is an abomination to me, damn near.
3) If BFS does mean more skilled players overall, how do you account for the increase in LA players that are smaller on average? I think this is a simple answer, as I posted above. This one seems to be also in play for argument.
As the hitters get bigger (and they have at least gotten taller over the last 20-30 years), it has an effect on the way the game is played. It is pretty reasonable to expect that bigger hitters = more homeruns (and more runs generally). This means more pitches, more pitching changes, longer games, and 12-13 man pitching staffs. The game is a lot different to watch than the game was when I was first getting into baseball. It becomes a matter of personal preference to decide what you like better.
I find it interesting that the percentage of very tall pitchers remains relatively fixed over the last 30 years, but the % of tall hitters has grown. During this time, we have seen the balance between offense and defense swing more in favor of the offense than it was 30 years ago. This might just be a coincidence. But it probably isn't.
Of the current top 10 in OPS for MLB, here is the list of guys who are listed as shorter than 6'3":
Prince Fielder (6'0")
Raul Ibanez (6'2")
Chase Utley (6'1"; the only one of these 4 listed at less than 200 lbs)
Luke Scott (6'0")
So the 10 best hitters in MLB are mostly pretty big dudes.
Yea, I think that the answer is also pretty simple. I basically agree with your statement:
Baseball has room for a certain number of position players who are shorter than 6' tall, particularly if they can have highly developed skills. Yet, about 3/4 of the non-US players who debuted between 2000-2005 were 6' or taller. So these guys are shorter on average than the average MLB player, but they are not exactly short.
Why, I must ask, can they not be faster and stronger? Why are you equating size with strength and speed?
As far as not getting bigger that is absolutely false. It is true that a huge segment of the baseball pool is only as big as players were back in the 1950's and 60's but what is also true is that the majority of baseball players are bigger than the 1950's and 60's era players. So basically what the LA and Asian players have done is simply slow the height growth. They have not reversed it. It means that as LA and Asian players continue to get BFS then so to will MLB players.
Ok, but aren't most elite athletes in track and field and weightlifting and swimming and such, in fact, demonstrably faster and stronger than the athletes from past eras? Why wouldn't baseball players, and football players, hockey players, basketball players, be any different?
I'm actually kind of confused as to what sheer size has to do with anything. You've demonstrated that they aren't any larger, ok, and that one cannot assert today's players must be faster and stronger than players from bygone eras due to size, but, and I'm in any sort of position to demonstrate this, so I'll accept I could be wrong, but aren't there plenty of ways to demonstrate today's athlete is faster and stronger without bringing size into the equation at all? I guess what I'm saying is why would sheer size correlate with speed and strength at all to begin with?
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