Short, Fat Pitchers

To be honest, my first reaction to this post was:

Dude, what are you doing up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday?

Then I realized, you were actually posting at 2 a.m. your time. Though I'm not sure if that's any better.

Well, Midlo, I don't have a field to plow, a paper route, nor do I own an espresso shop. I guess that means I can assign my own beddy-bye times.

Well I AM relatively short (5'9'') and overweight... (216 lbs)

I guess I could be Bartolo Colon

As I was reading this story, the thought "April Fools" kept running through my head.

Some scouts like the RHP with a big butt and thick thighs, certainly Colon fits that description. A few years ago my son and I saw a AA minor league game where one team brought in a stumpy LHP named Ed Puig. Puig was probably about 30 at the time, was 5'9" or so, weighed well over 200 lbs. Looked like in stature a shorter version of Fernando Valenzalua. We thought a perfect nickname for him would be Porky, you know...Porky Puig? Anyway for 2 innings he threw nothing but curves and sliders, changed speed off of those, and had the other team's hot shot prospects completely befuddled. He never went above AA, AAA and MLB hitters can hit that stuff. Still it was fun to watch.

Bum,
I think the study has very little meaning. The differences found are really quite slight. In part 5, the author comments "First of all, there’s not that much variance among the groups. Nevertheless, due to the sizes of the samples, the differences are for the most part statistically significant."

It is reasonable to believe that some of the differences are significant in a narrow statistical sense. But in a broader sense the results are likely to be insignificant. By necessity, the author uses published weights and heights, which we know to be fanciful, especially for players who are unusually short, tall, thin or thick. Whether or not a particular short pitcher is included in the study may be based primarily on how much inflation his team uses in the media guide. Moreover, as a general principle, using the extremes of a distribution of some measure (e.g. height, IQ, length of hair) to determine the variation in performance as a function of that measure is a poor idea. The approach has a high risk of selection bias, and frequently the extremes of a population don't behave in the same way as the rest of the population.

Another criticism: The author finds that pitchers who are at least 21 lbs heavier than the average among pitchers of their height have slightly better records. He has tried to control for players generally becoming taller and heavier over the last 60 years, which is the duration of the study. However, he doesn't seem (hard to tell for sure--he leaves out a lot of details) to have controlled for the likelihood that an individual pitcher will gain weight as he ages. Successful pitchers tend to last longer than their less skilled brethren, and so it is reasonable that successful (and thus older) pitchers would more likely fall into the "fat" category. In other words, a possible conclusion is not that fat pitchers are better, but good pitchers tend to get fat.

If I had patience, I could go on, but it should be clear that, in my opinion, there is little reason to trust that the differences found in this study are meaningful.

3fingeredglove.. I agree with you, and that makes a lot of sense to me. When I posted this article under the title "Short, Fat Pitchers are Better" it was because it seemed like a funny study that I'd pass along just for conversation. The title of the thread was meant to reflect the author's conclusions, not my opinion. I don't take the study seriously and certainly don't want anyone to think I really believe this.. I don't. So today I changed the title of the thread to "Short, Fat Pitchers".

Frankly if I were a scout I'd take the most talented pitcher regardless of size with extra emphasis on projectibility. Just to reiterate, this study does NOT reflect my way of thinking either.

i'm going to go out on a limb. and it's a big limb. this article was written by the father of a short,fat pitcher.

Interesting stuff. I will go back through and read all of the sections. Perry Husband had some comments about shorter pitchers in his book three about better deception of pitches.

Does Chad Billingsly fit the mold? One could certainly argue he is well grounded...