Sizing Up Sports

I've heard it said that one reason for baseball's popularity is that it seems like an everyman's sport. Yes, many baseball players are athletes, but there are also many who are just schmucks that happen to be good at this one odd skill of hitting a ball. There's something to be said for that: a lot of sports fandom is about fantasy, and it's easy for any of us with Y chromosomes to imagine ourselves playing baseball. You can be as thin as Ted Williams, as heavy as Babe Ruth, as tall as Randy Johnson, as short as Craig Biggio, or as whatever as Kirby Puckett.

That's something that's missing in other sports. Football is played by people who are increasingly far from the mean. Offensive linemen are expected to be 300+ pounds, linebackers have to be big enough to push aside people who weigh 300+ pounds, and Drew Brees is considered small at six feet. The running backs are the closest to normal size, but have the life expectancy of a fruit fly.

Hockey used to be played by average people (can you believe Rocket Richard was 5'10"?) But increasingly it's dominated by large people. Yes, there's still the odd Johnny Gaudreau, but they're pretty rare. During the draft, count how many time teams take a chance on a small player, and how many times they draft a big, unskilled player, assuming he'll learn eventually.

But the ultimate physically-unreachable sport has always been basketball. When all the seven-foot-tall people on earth get drawn to this one sport, it's hard to feel like those of us with lesser genetics even have a chance. But it's not just the super-tall people: you need to be about six-and-a-half feet to be considered for the "small forward" position. 

And it's not just the size of the players: even the players nearer the hump of the bell curve seem to be perfectly balanced muscular specimens. Not like baseball's spectrum from the lanky to the muscle-bound.

All of this is why the NBA's new MVP Stephen Curry is a breath of fresh air. It's not just his relative lack of height, it's that he's downright scrawny. He looks like the "before" picture to Lebron James's "after." And yet here he is, not just competing but dominating in a sport that that's usually too busy celebrating superstars to even notice the underdogs.

Hopefully this is a turning point for basketball. Maybe someday we'll feel like you can succeed in the sport without winning the genetic lottery, and that a team can succeed without winning the draft lottery.