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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Now I'm curious about the height of high school baseball pitchers. My child is on the taller side at 6'2" but honestly I see a wide variety of heights in pitchers, including some short ones.

DS has average velo and lots of the faster pitchers so far are definitely shorter than he is. [/quote]

My kids are softball pitchers so it's a little different, but my understanding is the shorter pitchers have to perfect their mechanics at an even more obsessive rate to overcome the shorter limbs. Or perhaps these overall shorter pitchers happen to have proportionately short torsos.[/quote]

Longer arms are a huge advantage in ball throwing sports.  It's the distance the ball spends in their hand during the throw.  The ball can spend overall more time accelerating.   This has several advantages.  A) More time accelerating, faster overall velocity.  B) Even if the shorter arm compensates there is more time to control the ball in a less explosive throw.  C) If the shorter arm manages to compensate, there is a higher likelihood of injury because there are more forces involved.

In addition: longer arms will likely have more overall muscle mass to bring to bear.  The smaller pitcher may be able to do more pushups, but at the end of the day the ball is the same size so if I am 220lbs and I do a pushup, it takes much more power to do so than a 180lb person.  I think this where many short people make about tall athletes.  They tend to quantify speed, but often times it's power and tall athletes' power is often off the charts.  I really realized this taking spinning classes where they measure it, I have to push like twice as many watts as the instructor recommended just to get a workout.  But the way that translates to cycling, taller/bigger riders are better for sprints and track riding, but for mountain climbing smaller riders are better.

So higher speeds, more control and less risk of injury more muscle mass.

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