Why are MLB managers so short?

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But baseball managers almost all come from baseball players, and baseball players are much taller than the average human. The average listed playing height of the 29 active managers (Baltimore’s dugout is currently empty) was 72.4 inches, just a nudge over 6 feet. Tall for humans, but short for ballplayers: During these managers’ playing careers, the median ballplayer height was, on average, 73.4 inches.

Furthermore, baseball heights are generally badumed to be a bit misleading at the bottom of the scale, where a scout who wants to convince his boss to draft a player might fudge upward and a player who wants to be drafted might embrace the higher estimate. Five-foot-nine “rounds up” to 5-foot-10, and 5-foot-10 becomes 6 feet. So while the data say managers are short, the circumstantial evidence suggests the data might even be underselling the degree.

Does this matter? It’s obviously not an important matter in the way racial and cultural representation among baseball managers is important. “Managers are short” is a much more frivolous observation. But it tells us something about baseball teams when they collectively do something different than we might expect.

For almost a century, scientists and economists and insurance actuaries have found tall people get the edge in most leadership promotions: Tall people get bigger signing bonuses, tall people are more likely to be promoted into management positions, and tall salesmen make more sales. These biases favor tall presidential candidates — the taller candidate has won the popular vote in two-thirds of elections — but they also favor tall employees in all categories of fields, including, surprisingly, back-office professional services and blue-collar occupations. “Taller individuals are judged as being more persuasive … and more likely to emerge as a leader of other people,” wrote Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable in the Journal of Applied Psychology. They introduced a “theoretical model of the height-career success relationship,” which looks like this:

Tall people feel more confident; others feel more confident in them; and those two factors boost both subjective performance (how they are viewed to be doing their jobs, regardless of the truth) and objective performance (especially in jobs like sales or management, where leadership and confidence are probably advantageous). It’s all a self-reinforcing system: “People tend to take on the attributes that society ascribes to them,” Judge and Cable wrote. A 6-foot male, their research suggested, “would be predicted to earn almost $166,000 more across a 30-year career than an individual who is 65 inches tall.”

Drawing this back to baseball: Teams are apparently not falling for this bias, which is surprising and impressive. Sports are often described as a pure meritocracy — with precise measurements and clear, unambiguous incentives — so it’s pretty hard to scam your way into the majors. But sports managing is the opposite. The skills required are squishy; the evaluation is subjective; a huge part of the job is interpersonal, or public relations; and it would make sense that teams (and the public) would unwittingly favor the taller candidates, as most of the world apparently does.

This isn’t the case.

And just as a tall salesman might be perceived as a better salesman, and also be a better salesman (because the customer favors tall salesmen), a shorter ballplayer might be perceived as a better manager candidate and also be a better manager candidate (because his players might more easily believe he had to work hard and be smart to get to where he got).

But another, more powerful factor is one that you might well have been shouting at your screen all along: Managers mostly aren’t pitchers.

Pitchers are taller than hitters. (Height is a bigger advantage for pitchers than it has been for hitters.) For that matter, first basemen are taller than outfielders, and outfielders are taller than third basemen, and so on:

1B: 74.6 inches, on average, in 2018
P: 74.5
OF: 73.1
3B: 72.8
C: 72.8
SS: 72.7
2B: 71.6

Of the 29 active managers, only two — Mickey Callaway and Bud Black — were pitchers. (Both are taller-than-average managers. And pitching coaches are, on average, an inch and a half taller than their managers.)

Only two managers were first basemen, and only five were outfielders. Nine were catchers, who are about two-tenths of an inch shorter than the average major league hitter, and (including pitchers) close to an inch shorter than the average major league player.

So we did some math. We compared each manager’s listed playing height with the average ballplayer height during his career, but adjusted for what position he played. The average manager’s height, remember, is 72.4 inches. His contemporary peers, at the same position, were on average 72.6 inches tall. Our managers are still short, but only a little short. Not, you might argue, enough to write an article about.

But this actually confirms the two points worth thinking about. The first is, unlike most of the rest of the world of management, teams do not give extra credit for height. They don’t fall for the fallacy that “tall” equals “leader.” They might go the other way — there might be something related to Nichols’ Law that applies to managers — but they definitely don’t think that “height equals power,” as researchers have hypothesized.