Hey There, Sports Fans
Well, there’s a first time for everything. Welcome to our first post about baseball! Renee sends along this article about Red Sox player Curt Schilling, who has just signed a contract that gives him $333,333 once a month for six months if he “passes” a random weigh-in; that is, if he maintains his weight. Renee says:
I was pleasantly surprised by this comment at the end of the article: “Being overweight and out of shape are two different things.” I know this is a point of contention among many, but it’s nice to get a comment like that from a professional athlete and a male, no less, who struggles with his weight.
Here is the full context for the quote:
“I inserted the weigh-in clause in the second round of offers,” Schilling wrote. “Given the mistakes I made last winter and into spring training I needed to show them I recognized that, and understood the importance of it. Being overweight and out of shape are two different things. I also was completely broadsided by the fact that your body doesn’t act/react the same way as you get older, even after being told that for the first 39 years of my life.”
As you can see, the meaning of that quote isn’t exactly clear; maybe he means that he felt like he was still in shape but was overweight? And he made some mistakes? (I don’t know what those were, since I don’t watch baseball. But didn’t that team win the World Series again this year? Right? Oh god, I know nothing about sports.) Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks, Renee!
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Cold Hard Cash, Exercise, Health
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I think this is just sad. Even though I find Schilling personally obnoxious on many levels, yes, his team did just win the WS, and he was a big part of it, and he deserved better than to be held to some stupid arbitrary “weight clause” in order to get re-signed. If they were going to throw in a fitness standard of some sort, a treadmill test or even a radar gun testing of his velocity would have been a lot more appropriate.
As a fan of some of baseball’s bigger players (Andres Galarraga and Nick Johnson in particular), I find that appalling, especially since Schilling is a pitcher in the American League no less. Of course he needs to be in good shape and all, but he doesn’t have to be the fast runner. Heck, he doesn’t even go to bat, so I don’t see why this is such a big deal…
And I agree: make him take health measurement tests like threadmill but screw the number on the scale.
Well, as you know Mo, I have a little knowledge of baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular…
My understanding is that Schilling didn’t keep up with his off-season conditioning between the 2006 and 2007 seasons (due to other things occupying his time), and consequently came into the 2007 season both out of shape and overweight. Since he’s a pretty big guy naturally and he has some health problems in his background (ranging from shoulder surgery to his famous “bloody sock” games from the 2004 playoffs), in addition to being in his late 30s (which is old for a pro baseball player), I think the net result is that he was putting too much stress on his body. Consequently he spent several weeks on the disabled list during the 2007 season and came back and performed much better afterwards than he did before, possibly because he spent that time losing some weight and getting into better shape.
Pitching is a high-stress activity: An overhand throwing motion is not a natural one for the human body, and puts a lot of stress on the shoulder and the elbow. Most of the force of a pitch is generated with the legs (the arm basically acts like a whip to convey the force generated by the legs), which puts a lot of stress on the ankles and knees, and excess weight can of course exacerbate those stresses. Better conditioning can make the body better able to withstand those stresses, but weighing less helps too.
I’m not talking about garden-variety stress, either: There have been pitchers who have actually broken their arms while making a pitch in a Major League game. For example, Tom Browning. This is not common, but I bring it up as an illustration of what can happen when you’re a pitcher competing at the highest level.
Schilling is also a pitcher with pinpoint control, and I can imagine that if his body’s weight were distributed differently due to weighing more or being out of shape then it might throw off his balance, and thus his control (which leads to fewer strikeouts and more walks – not good for a pitcher).
To be fair, I’m engaging in some speculation here. But my interpretation is that the bottom line is that Schilling is giving himself some motivation to meet certain goals for himself. Major League Baseball’s contract rules are pretty strict about how performance bonuses can be defined – you can measure weight, you can’t really measure conditioning – so it might be that bonuses tied to weight were the only way to objectively define the goals in the contract. Schilling clearly recognizes that weight isn’t the only factor (as he says in the article), but he has to work within MLB’s contract rules, too.
Hey mhr! That was extremely interesting and makes a lot of sense; thanks!
My favorite quote of the whole article was the line at the end…how he was really bowled over by the fact that the body doesn’t act/react the same as you get older. Brilliance!
Schilling is actually 41 years old this month. Which is downright OLD for a pitcher, even one who isn’t a single ounce “overweight.” The Mets’ Tom Glavine is about 6 months older, and won his 300th game this past season, but right after that fell off the table pretty severely the last two months of the season. (Glavine is a free agent and it’s unlikely the Mets will re-sign him.) Glavine is downright taut and is known to be a fanatic about his conditioning (and always was even as a younger man).
OTOH, you have a pitcher like Greg Maddux of the Padres, who is about the same age as Glavine, and at this point (the tail end of a first-ballot Hall of Fame career) is about at the same level of effectiveness — i.e. wildly inconsistent, but “on” when he is “on.” His “workout regime” famously consists of golf and not much else (at least not that he admits), but he does not put on weight as easily as Schilling does.
And then you have David Wells of the Dodgers, who is even older than *I* am (45 in May), and has always been inarguably fat and a notoriously heavy drinker besides. I do understand he cut back on the drinking to almost nothing after being diagnosed with diabetes this past year, in addition to making some other changes in his diet, but is still a pretty big dude. Yet, he always seems to be able to pitch well enough to keep getting invited back. He has, himself, signed contracts with weight clauses in them in the past; for all I know he’s on one of those now with the Dodgers.
My best guess is that pitchers have to do what gets results for them as individuals, even if it doesn’t always “look right” to other people. Maybe some of Schilling’s favorite fat-burning substances were outlawed in MLB’s drug-testing sweep, who knows. (Some of his comments about “mistakes” seem kind of cryptic in that regard.)
Also, I didn’t realize that the players’ union specifically prohibited things like treadmill testing in a contract clause. If that’s so, I fail to understand why they allow a weight clause. They have a radar gun at home plate, not a scale.
This thread brought to my mind another reality about sports. Your training does condition your body for particular activities, but fitness isn’t a complete protective shield against injury.
Now, I know that nobody is saying that it is, and I realize that isn’t what this article is about. It just made me recall the day I was telling my significant other about Brother Crash pronouncing that Sarah (fatgirlonabike) was grinding her joints to a pulp. My SO started telling me about the major joint injuries she saw on her orthopedic rotation (she’s a practicing physician assistant). She saw 23 yr old guys who had low BMI/weight but had the joints of 80 yr old arthritics.
Interesting comments.
Oops. She mentioned that those injuries were sports injuries. Pitchers can have nightmare shoulders & arms – on the throwing side.
What weight has to do with that I’m not sure.
I know nada about baseball or rounders as I knew it back in the day.
“…..his slow start and injury were directly attributed to coming to spring trainning overweight, having changed his mind in the spring about pitching beyond 2007”
It also seems that the weight clauses were inserted by him, adopting the well known pose of the penitent fatty.
“I inserted the weigh-in clause…” and “Given the mistakes I made last winter…..I NEEDED to show them I recognized that and understood the importance of it”
This is what we do! (before we know better) I knows I bin bad to be fats, but I’s gunna be good from now on boss!
I wouldn’t jump to too many conclusions about the effects of weight gain on physical abilities, I think we should observe objectively before we draw conclusions from fat=physical incompetence, I don’t mean to be harsh, but too many people’s lives are being curtailed by these assumptions, the body often surprises and doesn’t behave or respond in the expected ways.
I know nothing about baseball but there are some interesting comments about how weight affects injury and ability do different physical things safely.
My take on it is that I think everyone’s built different, so everyone has different thresholds for how much their body can take. Me, I think because I’ve been overweight pretty much my whole life- my body is used to a whole lot more weight in general, and I think I have bigger muscles to compensate. Right now I’m definitely above the weight where I can do things but I know I never had the problems I have now when I weighed less but was still overweight.
here is a quote from Schilling – you can read more in his blog which is mentioned below:
“On his blog at 38pitches.com, the 40-year-old Schilling acknowledges he was overweight when he reported to spring training this year and that he was “broad sided” by how difficult it was for his older body to respond the way it did earlier in his career. ”
Also, apparently this “weight clause” was Schillings idea.