from Amazon
Monday, August 21, 2006
Who’s getting bigger?
Joe Arthur says:
height increase is about 1.3 inches between players born in the 1920s and born in the 1970s; weight is about 12 lbs higher.
I was surprised the difference is so small.
I also follow hockey, and there’s no question these numbers wouldn’t hold. Guys were considered “big” when they hit 200 pounds, and that was just 30 years ago. This defenseman used to be considered HUGE at 218 pounds:
http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php3?pid=2787
Now, you have power forwards at that weight. Even the term power forward I never heard of in my youth.
70 years ago, this 136 pound player was one of the best players in the league:
http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php3?pid=00002579
And he played for 15 seasons.
My guess is that the gain in hockey is at the very least 30 pounds, and more likely 50 pounds. Players are of course far faster today than they were back then as well. Strength and speed are huge assets in hockey, so, there’s no question that the quality of the player has improved. My guess is a similar shift has happened in football and basketball?
But, if I look for only 160-180 pounds players in the NHL today, and in the NHL 30 or 60 years ago, it’s possible that I won’t see much improvement in quality of the players. That is, if one wanted to speculate that there’s been little improvement in baseball players is that the size of the player hasn’t changed much. Big guys simply don’t have the advantage in baseball that they would have in the other sports. So, you won’t get that influx of the population. There are bigger and better and faster athletes, but they are not necessarily playing baseball. They’re leveraging their skills elsewhere.
Interesting suggestion that the relative stability of player size implies relative stability of the quality of play ; kind of aligns with what Phil Birnbaum mentioned on his blog recently in which he suggests that to measure player improvement, in theory “You can look at pitch speeds, and ball distances, and so on. You can use physics as the unchanging ruler to check performance against.”
Note: My remark was quoted from a comment (http://stats.mostvaluablenetwork.com/general/does-size-matter/ ) on David Gassko’s blog as a followup to his HBT articles.