Morning Poles: Special K Edition

As the Steroid Era slowly disappears in the rear view mirror it appears that MLB has reached the dawn of a new age: the Jenny Craig Era. Seriously, aside from the usual spring training cliches surrounding adjustments, focus, and off-season regimes that reflect the unbridled optimism of Spring Training, has anyone ever remembered a spring where so much attention has been paid to weight loss?

It wasn't long ago that I remember announcers in the Jays locker room saying the players looked more like a football squad than a baseball team. Now big boys, like C.C. and Panda, have joined the "weightlifters", like A-Rod, Manny and Francoeur, and all reported to camp seriously slimmed down.

But does any of this really matter? That is for baseball performance, I mean. I am sure C.C. is dodging a serious diabetes bullet by refraining from eating an entire box of Cap'n Crunch every morning but baseball is replete with examples of "larger than life" athletes who succeed at the sport.  Sandoval had a great year in 2009 as big boy, and Crunch Berries has had C.C. on a Hall of Fame track his entire career.

As an interesting exercise in meaningless stats I decided to calculate the Body Mass Index (BMI) for the top and bottom 10 MLB hitters as they rank according to Wins Above Replacement (WAR). Of course this is mostly just for fun as a result of limited sample size and limitations with BMI as well as listed weights. However, the results:

Top 10 MLB hitters average BMI: 28.61
Bottom 10 MLB hitters average BMI: 27.89


On average the best players (non-pitchers) in MLB tend to be larger than their struggling counterparts. If we take Carlos Lee out of the bottom 10, as his BMI is a huge outlier at 34.0 - over 3 points higher than the next biggest player (Beltre) on the list, the bottom ten average plummets to 27.2.

Maybe we shouldn't be getting to excited about our favorite players getting skinnier.