The Tall and the Short of it

Derek Milhous Zumsteg

Defense and clubhouse leadership mean nothing. You know how you win games? Pick up all the really tall guys you can and start scoring runs. There is a strong, previously unknown relationship between the size of your bats and the number of times you score (a conclusion explored in other fields but, oddly, not baseball).

As a baseline, the correlation between on-base percentage and win percentage is about 90% - about as close as you're likely to see in a game of chance. On the other hand, the relationship between stealing bases and scoring runs is about 5%, statistically insignificant (also much more stupid compared to playing the OBP-SLG game). But height -- height came out at a whopping 14% correlation in the AL (three times as strong as stealing bases), and in the NL, home of 'NL baseball' -- it was 32%, six times stronger than stealing bases. Overall, it was a 26% correlation. Hooo mama!

Here's an interesting couple of tables, runs scored against average height in inches:

Doesn't look all that impressive, but you can see there's a definite relationship. Now for the NL:

"Impressive. Most impressive."

I got these numbers by running the most recent batting orders I could get, including platoons, and taking the average height and then dividing by runs scored.

Correlation, of course, does not imply causation -- that your team's been winning playing a terrible outfield doesn't mean you're winning because of them, but there is some logical conclusion: those big hitters do seem to tear the ball around a lot more than Little O and Little Rey. Further research into this will probe into whether there's a weight/runs relationship, and the relationship between height and pitching effectiveness.

Other interesting facts discovered in my research:

Height	Number of Guys
5' 8"	3
5' 9"	12
5' 10"	20
5' 11"	34
6' 0"	47
6' 1"	43
6' 2"	53
6' 3"	35
6' 4"	16
6' 5"	4
6' 7"	2

Nearly a Bell Curve distribution, as nice as you're likely to see given a population sample of this size. Most Popular Height: 6'2". Most Congenial? 6'7".

The simple lesson in all this: tall people are better than short people, and sometimes the weirdest research comes from the coolest places. I suggest someone with better statistical tools do more serious, wider research.

 

about the author

Don't let word get out, but Derek Milhous Zumsteg is 5' 2" even in shoes with really thick soles. Offer up comparisons to St. Louis Browns infamous pinch hitter Eddie Gaedel.