In a ton of Miguel Cabrera topics, I've seen at least 40000000000000000 posts per topic about his weight, does it really affect him that much? It doesn't seem to be affecting him hitting but would his fielding really improve if chubs doesn't steal from the cookie jar too often? Or does he just suck as a fielder. There have been plenty fat players in baseball that are/where great players: Babe, Gagne, Fielder... you get the point (Fransisco Cordero's also 235 pounds). How fat is too fat?

First, I think it's self-evident that excess weight will affect elements of his defense- think about "range" for starters - as well as things like his value on the base paths (although he has a pretty bad SB ratio for his career) and etc.

Next, people bring up people like Ruth, Gwynn or Fielder - unique players with unique body shapes - but the vast majority of baseball players a.) do not have their talent and b.) do not have their body shape. Yes, John Kruk famously said he's not an athlete, he's a ballplayer - still, though, most ball players are in pretty decent shape, and those who are out of shape tend to either have one limited/unique skill (Matt Stairs) or suck (Lenny Harris) or pitch (Bartolo Colon, who also falls under "suck").

So is Cabrera the Babe? Well, first, we can say that it just might be affecting his hitting - while Cabrera was still an elite-level hitter last year, his EQA dropped .012 points (from .333 to .321), and he hit a few more HRs but dropped a larger amount in 2B, not a great indicator going forward. Besides this, his value takes an instant hit if he eats himself off 3B to 1B, just by nature of the defensive spectrum - plus, he isn't really all that good at 3B right now, apparently.

So, essentially, I think it's an easy answer: any fatter would be "too fat" in one sense (overall value), all corner-case comparisons to Tony Gwynn at age 35 aside. This does not mean he's not an elite talent coming off his age-24 season - he's HOF-caliber. He's also Friendly's-caliber, and this should not be tossed aside because Babe Ruth drank whiskey and smoked back in the 1920s - those kinds of comparisons suck.

Until late in his career, Babe Ruth was not fat. Not even remotely. This common misconception owes much to his round, boyish face and to the fact that he was misportrayed as fat in movies. In fact he was all muscle, barrell-chested, fast runner, a mobile outfielder with great footwork - basically a complete five-tool guy. It was not until late in his career that his lifestyle caught up with him and he started putting on extra pounds - and his performance most definitely suffered for it.

Babe Ruth? When was this, exactly- when he turned 39, 40?

He had the one season where he was "sick," but I don't see much of his performance having suffered- unless you're referring to anecdotal stuff about his defense and speed.

I think he suffered a pretty significant dropoff in all major batting numbers in his last two years. The burden is not on me to prove that this precipitous drop related to his weight gain. (Although that's readily inferrable and probably correct, particularly in an age when so little was known, comparitively, about staying in shape.) The burden of proof, rather, is on the initial poster who characterized Ruth as fat for the purpose of asking whether fatitude is really a problem - when in fact Ruth wasn't fat at all.

To imply, in passing, that the hard-living Ruth got fat and significantly less athletically capable around age 40, when such a phenomenon happens to the vast majority of humans on the planet (ballplayers included) at that same stage of life, is not exactly an invitation to controversy. Let's keep our eyes on the ball here: I am not proving a case but impeaching someone else's claim that Ruth was some kind of athletic freak who dominated baseball despite being a bulbous tub of goo. He was no such tub, and he carried no such goo.

The main concern I have about a youngster who has put on so much weight in so little time is durability. How are his knees going to hold up over the long-haul? The guy is asking his joints to handle a 33% weight increase or whatever it is which makes him a considerable liability.

I think this is an oversimplification. He was certainly trim-looking in his Sox days, but he started to battle weight problems from the early '20s on, though he didn't lose the battle for good until the '30s. If you look at photos from various stages of his career, his weight is all over the place--you can find photos from as early as 1921 where he looks decidedly tubby, and from as late as 1929 where he looks reasonably fit.

Just for several examples in one convenient place, go here:

http://collections.mnhs.org/visualresource...earchType=Basic

This is absolutely true. To your main point, you're right- Ruth was certainly not "fat," and doesn't really belong in the discussion.

His decline is interesting though, because it happened pretty precipitously, instead of maybe a drifting of a couple years in between Baseball Supernova and "couldn't run to 1st base." Just as a tangent, I wonder if the "lifestyle" half burned him out before the "weight gain" side effect had a chance to. Obviously it's nearly impossible to separate his age and the era/ medicine from that, so it'd be pretty tough to say either way.

Well, I think we need to seperate 'fat' and body shape. Anyway, since we don't have BMI or whatever they use these days, I'm not sure there is a way of quantifying it. Even if we take Schilling this year, he admitted that he was heavier than optimal, but his results wern't actually all that bad, and can weight gain actually cause arm tendonitus? Anyway, I'm pretty sure the the performance degradation from weight gain is non-linear.


It's a little difficult to tell with Ruth, as weight isn't an official statistic and baseball uniforms have some baggyness to them. (And pinstripes are slimming! -had to be said) He gained as he went along, although I agree with BANZAI!!!. (I think there is a quote about it from his later years where he says it helped him hit the ball harder.) Supposedly, in his last season, his fielding was so bad 3 pitchers threatened not to take the mound if he was in the lineup.

In Cabrera's case though, it's hard to see him gaining 15 pounds of muscle per year between ages 21 and 24. I don't know if you can say Cabrera is to fat now, but I think you can say that he will be by the time he's 30+ unless something changes.

He looks all right to me. Maybe five or ten pounds extra, but I certainly wouldn't call him "fat" in any of those player pics. He's not as fat as Ortiz was this season, or Mirabelli was in 2006. He does have an ginormous melonhead.

Is he holding the Pillsbury Doughboy?

I hate to derail a great rant, but how exactly does Bartolo Colon suck? Granted he's been pretty limited with his injuries recently, but he's had pretty solid career otherwise.

Either that, or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

I assume you're referring to this pic. That's the one I was talking about from 1929, where he looks pretty good at 34.

But then there's this one, where he looks pretty chunky to me at 30.

And this one from 1921, when he was 26:



That ain't all muscle.

I think part of it is the 'baseball pants effect', so some of that is probably air. I am enormously thankfully that spandex is not part of the baseball uniform, but it does make this more difficult.

Nah, it's a good point - Colon had a great career up until '06 (although his '04 was also below league average, it was obviously backed up by a CYA in '05), so it wasn't a great choice for a throw-away line, but at this point my general feeling is that Colon is a bad major league pitcher going forward from here (barring his injury issues becoming much more treatable, although it looks like some pretty serious issues right now, as far as I've heard).

Not the best choice for a throw-away joke, but I'm ok with calling a 34 year old guy with major shoulder issues a bad bet to return to his Cy Young caliber, or even back to a league-average innings eater.

I dunno--look carefully at the smoothly convex curve of the shirt placket below the letters. That doesn't look like air to me. I've seen a lot of beer bellies in my time (starting with the mirror every morning), and that, folks, is a beer belly.

I'll grant you that Ruth had the kind of body that looks a little thick even when he's not overweight, because of the big wide hips and butt. He was never going to look like a stick no matter what kind of shape he was in. But at the moment in 1921 when this picture was taken, he was wide in more places than the hips.

To compare Babe Ruth to anyone is preposterous because he was an otherwordly, once-in-a-century (at least) talent. Compare his accomplishments to his peers; consider that he was within a space of a few years THE best hitter and one of the best pitchers. That's never happened before or since, and is probably the reason he is the best player who ever played this game.

If this is a thinly-veiled, "Miggy Cabrera's 260 lbs ain't a problem" vehicle, it's stupid.

Yeah, but I gotta admit, another part of it is the "fatass effect.

I think the deteriorating effects of weight gain on top-flight baseball talent were conclusively proven by the Maalox Challenge.

I think it's safe to say that a weight problem will affect most major league ballplayers, e.g., Mo Vaughn. However, there have been exceptions, such as Rick Reuschel. Reuschel pitched for 19 years and won 214 games. In fact, he won 19 games at the age of 39 for the Giants in 1988. I'm not sure if Reuschel was always heavy, but I remember him being pretty hefty while pitching for the Giants. David Wells is another overweight pitcher that comes to mind.

For an everyday player in the field, excess weight is more of an issue, and therefore should be of concern to the 'Sox if they're thinking about making an offer to the Fighting Fish for Cabrera. If he becomes too heavy to play third base, then he'll end up being a statue at first base. Remember Jack Clark's defense at first?

Let's get this thread back on track...

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Miguel Cabrera at age 18:



And at age 24:



Now - I'n no expert in the subject of "How fat is too fat?". But there is a trend here that may have Cabrera looking like John Goodman in about 18 months if he's not careful, and that just cannot be good for his career.

Discuss...

Not to mention his health

You guys do realize that at least some of his weight gain is just him "filling out" like everyone does between the ages of 18 and 24. I'm not sure that photo tells us much since other than thicker limbs in keeping with a hitter with established power, everything else is deceptively inflated because all it is is a third baseman in a loose-fitting uniform going down for a grounder (and exhaling through clenched lips while he does it).

That picture is not a fair representation of Cabrera. In fact, it kind of looks like Bartolo Colon trying to field a grounder.