Size of Players

[His High Holiness]

All;

Anyone who has known me a while knows that I collect statistics, mostly about umpiring. Here is a trend about baseball, not umpiring, that I have noted for quite a while and I wonder if it is just me or the part of the country that I work. Only those that have passed the half century mark of life will have the necessary input.

When I played college baseball in the late 60's and early 1970's I was of average size of the players on my team. I went to the equivalent of a DIII school that only had about 1500 students. I was 6' 1/4" and 180 lbs. I was right in the middle of the team in terms of height and weight.

Today, age has robbed me of about 1/2 inch of height and I have added about 10 lbs. Yet I note that I am about 1-2 inches taller than the avarage D1 player for whom I umpire.

Today, kids physically mature about 3 months earlier than they did when I was growing up. Likewise, kids are about 4-6 months older when they graduate from high school than when I was growing up. (This is due to September 1 cutoffs for age in entering school instead of the January 1 cutoff that was common when I was growing up. In addition, lots of kids started school early in those days which is a rarer occurance today. I started college 3 weeks after my 17th birthday.) These two factors put together mean that college players today should have almost 9 months of physical maturity on the players of the 1960's. Yet, I am sure that the baseball players are smaller, unless my mind is playing tricks on me.

Last week, I did a high school varsity game which involved a team from the largest school in Virginia - 2500 students. Every single player on that team was shorter than I, most were 2-4 inches shorter. I will agree that the players of today are heavier than when I was in high school. Fatness in those days was unusual.

I attribute this to the fact that the NBA and the NFL were just coming of age in the late 1960's. More or the best athletes in those days went into baseball. Today, perhaps only the failures from the other sports wind up in baseball. I don't know.

I am not saying that the players today have less skill. I think that the pitching today is better. I am only talking about the height of the players. Have any of you other old timers noticed this? If so, any ideas on what is causing it.

Peter