By Robert Whiting (2017)
How tall are you?
If Americans don’t seem to be as tall as they used to be, there is good reason for that. According to a study by the journal eLife last year, Americans haven’t actually grown very much during the past half century—only about 2 inches. The average height for Americans is 5’9″ for men and 5’4″ for women, and it has stabilized over the past 50 years, in part due to a decline in diet quality.
Japanese, on the other hand, have grown about 6 inches over the past 50 years and are much taller than they were even 10 years ago. The average height is 172 cm, according to the Japan Sports Agency, and there are a lot of men in the 180 cm range—about 8 centimeters taller than 50 years ago. The average weight is 68 kg for men and 53 kg for women. Said the JSA, “The body weight of men has stayed in pace with height, meaning that physiques of men have remained pretty much the same. Women’s body weights have not increased in pace with their heights, though, with the result that women have become much, much slimmer.”
In contrast, Americans are falling behind in more ways than one. 100 years ago, the U.S. had the third tallest men and fourth tallest women in the world. Now it’s in the middle of the pack globally, ranking around 40th for both men and women. Heights in America peaked in 1988 for women and 1996 for men, and have started to recede. “There was a time when the U.S. was the land of plenty,” says Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London, who helped lead the study. “But increasingly over time, the quality of nutrition has worsened.”
Moreover, American weight has increased from an average of 175 pounds to 195 pounds over the past 30 years for men, and from 140 to 168 pounds for women. Americans have simply been consuming too many fast foods—too much pizza, cheeseburgers, French fries and milkshakes. Back in 1960 the image of the American was a slim, trim crew-cut man of 5’11” wearing khaki pants with a slide rule in his shirt pocket. Now the image of an American is an overweight person wearing Bermuda shorts, baseball cap on backwards, eating a Big Mac and sipping a jumbo-sized Coca-Cola from McDonald’s. We have become a fat people. By contrast, Japanese have grown taller and remained slim and trim, both male and female.
How is this change reflected in baseball? The average height of a major league player has increased almost 7% since the 1870s, from 68.9 inches to 73.7 inches. In terms of weight, the average ballplayer is almost 14% heavier than the average player in the 1870s, increasing from 167.3 lbs to 190.6 lbs. There was a pretty steep acceleration of player weight from the 1870s to the 1900s, then a decline through the 1920s, and then a steady increase since 1930.
Comparatively speaking, major league players have maintained a 5-6% height advantage over other US males every decade since 1960. What’s interesting is that the gap between the average major leaguer and the ordinary US male, weight-wise, has shrunk dramatically since 1960—from a 12% difference to just a tad over 2%. The steady difference in height makes sense, since people cannot actively affect their height and any natural change should take longer than a decade to manifest. Weight, on the other hand, can more easily be manipulated through exercise, weight training and diet. It’s clear the average US male has simply not packed on much muscle since 1960, certainly not at a higher rate than professional ballplayers—the closing gap, we must conclude, reflects the poor eating habits, nutritional value and decrease in exercise we see in the United States generally. What’s also interesting is the relatively mild change in weight for ballplayers by contrast: given the rampant use of steroids from the early ’90s through the mid-to-late 2000s, you might expect to see bigger jumps, but in fact the changes are minor.
Meanwhile, Japanese players seem to be getting bigger—just look at Darvish at 6’5″, Iwakuma at 6’5″ and Tanaka at 6’2″, all bigger than most major leaguers. So is Shohei Ohtani, at 6’5″. The advantage increasingly seems to be going to Japan, as the average has risen to 180 cm and 81.5 kg.
Moral of the story: stay away from McDonald’s. It’s unhealthy food and makes you gain weight.
Facts and figures
FYI, in case you are interested, the Dutch are the tallest in the world, with an average of 6 feet. According to Japan’s Ministry of Education, 11-year-old Japanese girls are 5 inches taller than they used to be 25 years ago. Japanese women have grown 6.3 inches, compared to Korean women, who have grown 7 inches—in fact, women in South Korea have gained 8 inches in height on average over the past century, a jump bigger than any other population in the world, researchers have reported. For men, Iranians are the big winners, gaining 6.5 inches over the past hundred years. Guatemalan women were the shortest in the world in 1914, measuring just about 4½ feet; they retain that title today, but have grown about 5 inches. Men are taller than women in every country by about 5 inches on average—a century ago, that difference was slightly lower, at 4 inches.
Shonben yakyu
A recent Yukan Fuji column dealt with the relationship between urination and MLB and was very well received. Many readers wrote in asking for more, so here you go—MLB also has a history of chronic urinators, if you will.
Rick Bosetti, an MLB outfielder from 1976-1982 who played for the Phillies, Cardinals and Blue Jays, played in all 162 games for the Blue Jays in 1979 and led all AL outfielders that season in putouts, assists and errors. He also claimed to have urinated on all the natural grass parks in the AL while with the Blue Jays that year, and was an advocate of interleague play just so he could have the chance to water Wrigley. He later went on to become the mayor of Redding, California, a small town near Mt. Shasta in Northern California. His exploits were recorded in the second volume of The Baseball Hall of Shame.
Greg Maddux anchored one of the greatest pitching rotations in MLB history—and he probably peed on them too. According to Chipper Jones’s 2017 memoir Ballplayer, the Hall of Fame pitcher once unsuspectingly urinated on him while they were talking in the shower. He reportedly did this to a lot of teammates, engaging them in conversation as the shower water poured down, just to see if he could get away with it without being noticed.
Bonus feature: stay out of the pool
About one in five Americans say they’ve urinated in a pool. Even the world’s most famous pool user, Michael Phelps, says, “Everybody does it.” Now scientists have finally figured out a way to quantify just how much urine is in our pools, and the results, published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, probably won’t please swimmers.
A research team testing 31 pools and hot tubs in Canada found evidence of urine in every single one of them. On average, there were 8 gallons of urine in a 110,000-gallon pool and 18.5 gallons in a 220,000-gallon pool. The results were even worse for hot tubs—one hotel hot tub was found to have three times the urine level of the worst swimming pool.
Researchers figured this out by measuring levels of acesulfame potassium, or Ace-K, an artificial sweetener found in soup, diet soda, candy, yogurt and much more. It doesn’t occur in nature, and 95 percent of it passes straight through the body unchanged, making it a good indicator of urine levels in water. While urine itself isn’t harmful, it can react with chlorine to create disinfectant byproducts, which can be. Still, researchers say they aren’t trying to turn people off swimming; they’d just like to remind everyone to please not pee in the pool.
Moral of this story: if you go on vacation to the United States this year, stay out of the hotel swimming pool.
And finally: every single MLB baseball is rubbed in Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, a unique “very fine” mud only found in a secret location near Palmyra, New Jersey. And the father of the actor Paul Giamatti (Spider-Man, Downton Abbey, Sideways, Billions) was A. Bartlett Giamatti, the MLB commissioner who negotiated the agreement that banned Pete Rose from baseball.
Tokyo Junkie 