Anthropometric and Performance Statistics Comparisons in Baseball Pitchers

Abstract

Athletic ability, performance, and motor skills depend greatly on human proportionality. Practicing sports at a high level is associated with a person’s ability to meet the biomechanical demands of a particular sport or playing position. The ideal somatotype of athletes in different sports and within the same sport has been described. However, there is limited evidence regarding the association between the anthropometric characteristics, such as body weight (BW), body height (BH), and body fat % (BF%) of collegiate baseball pitchers and baseball performance statistics (PS). PURPOSE: To compare BW, BH, BF% and selected baseball-specific PS, such as earned run average (era), batting average against % (b/avg-a%), and strike-out per innings pitched for 9 innings (so/ip)*9 in NCAA Division I pitchers; to examine the relationship between BW, BH, BF% and baseball-specific PS. METHODS: During a 5-year period, 210 collegiate pitchers (age 19.7 + 1.2 yr; weight 92 + 8.2 kg) were assessed for body weight (BW), body height (BH), and body fat % (BF%). The following pitchers’ baseball statistics were collected: era, b/avg-a%, and (so/ip)*9. BW, BH, BF%, and PS were normalized to z-scores. Missing data were estimated from least squares prediction from non-missing variables. Forward multiple stepwise regression was used to evaluate the relative impact of BW, BH, and BF% on PS (JMP® Pro 13). RESULTS: BH is significantly correlated both with b/avg-a% (r=-0.18, p=0.0104) and era (r=0.22, p=0.0010). BW is significantly correlated with (so/ip)*9 (r=0.22, p=0.0016). BF% is significantly correlated with both era (r=-0.26, p=0.0001) and (so/ip)*9 (r=-0.14, p=0.0472). Strike-out per innings pitched for 9 innings was selected as the independent variable with the highest goodness of fit significantly correlating with BW (p=0.0004), BH (p=0.0004), and BF% (p=0.0022) with adjusted R2=0.12. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that BW, BH, and BF% of pitchers correlate with b/avg-a%, era, and (so/ip)*9. BW, BH, and BF% appeared to provide the greatest predictive power of (so/ip)*9. The selected anthropometric variables accounted for 12% of the variance in (so/ip)*9. Runs are usually scored by hits. Coaches and trainers want pitchers to prevent runs. Therefore, they may need to account for other factors besides BW, BH, and BF%.