Brad Zimmer Is Ridiculous
I’m not a particularly fast person. I was born in Jamaica, though, and Usain Bolt has practically been the country’s patron saint for the last decade, so particularly fast people amaze me. And what’s most amazing about Bolt isn’t even his raw foot speed, but rather that foot speed relative to his height. At 6-foot-5, he stands out among the crowd, from the blocks to the finish line, taking up to 15% fewer strides while breaking records.
We sort of have our own Usain Bolt in the major leagues. His name is Brad Zimmer and he patrols center field for the Cleveland Indians.
Of course, part of this is hyperbole. Bolt is among the fastest men in the universe and traveled 40.2 feet per second in his record run. Brad is the second-fastest man in baseball and is averaging 30.1 feet per second this year. But they’re roughly the same height, and that’s meaningful — even if the average baseball player is a couple inches taller than the average sprinter.
Take a look at where Zimmer ranks if you plot this year’s players by foot speed and height. He’s the red dot.
Yeah, so he’s an outlier. His teammates apparently call him The Machine. And his combination of speed and length means he can do fun things like this:
And this:
Jordan Bastian talked to Andrew Miller after those two catches, and the Indians reliever characterized the phenomenon well. “I think he’s so big compared to what we think of as the speedy guys. Whether that’s just getting from home to first, beating out a ground ball, running in a gap, stealing a base, it’s a little bit confusing to the eyes. You’re used to seeing the little guys that are the speedsters.”
There are a couple non-baseball reasons you usually see speedsters come in smaller packages. One has to do with drag. According to The Journal of Sports and Medicine (and Newton’s second law), “[T]he acceleration of the body is proportional to the force produced but inversely proportional to the body mass… This implies an inverse relationship between height and performance in disciplines such as sprint running.” Or, as Edward McClelland paraphrased it for Slate: “It’s hard to produce enough power to overcome the drag of a big body.”
Perhaps Bolt and Zimmer counter this by being rail thin. More likely, it’s about good running form. Carl Crawford, who encountered injury after injury to his hamstrings, once pointed out that it was because of his poor form. He told me once that he can “get too long with the stride, and that causes hamstring problems.”
In that same Slate story, McClelland points out that Bolt’s running coach shortened the sprinter’s stride and wanted to ensure that he kept his knees up. Sage advice. Though it doesn’t seem Zimmer needs it, if you watch those clips from above, what’s maybe most confusing to the eyes is that his strides aren’t the long, loping strides you might expect. They’re a blur, even though they’re long.
“I’d take him in a race with just about anybody,” his teammate Miller told Bastian that day. Seems like Zimmer’s ready for the competition.
let's get it on!
— Bradley Zimmer (@Bzimmer5) June 22, 2017
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Drag seems like the wrong word to use (though that is what McClelland said). It’s more that there’s more mass to accelerate which takes more energy! Air resistance only makes a small difference.
There’s also “time to full speed” / acceleration rate. A shorter person will take more steps in the same distance over the same time span than a taller person and get that many more steps/pushes to get up to speed in x distance. Baseball plays that look very athletic/speedy like closing the gap on a sinking liner or stealing a base seem to favor the best accelerators.
I’m holding my breath until I see a “Mike Trout is a Coefficient of Friction Outlier” post.
The proper term is inertia.
Didn’t even know you were born in Jamaica. How many countries have you lived in? I know you lived in Germany for a while
Don’t respond, Enos, its a trap!
I’ve been compromised!
Haven’t actually heard “the Machine” as a nickname for him yet. I’ve heard “the Real Zim Shady”, “The Zim Reaper”, “Invader Zim”, and “Braddy Long-legs”, though.
Well that last one would have been perfect for the piece, huh
Pat Burrell is ‘The Machine’ if Zimmer wants the nickname he can peel it off Pat’s sweaty, chaffed body.
Pat Burrell’s nickname was Pat the bat. Pujols had the nickname the machine
I always referred to Burrell as “Pat the Glove” in the same way they call big people “Tiny”
His scouting report only lists his speed as a 60/55. How are the scouts so off on this? Speed seams like a pretty easy thing to measure.
This is related to my ongoing gripes about how scouts think about body types–“big” guys supposedly aren’t agile or fast. I get why they say that, but then you see Brad Zimmer was only rated a 60 and you think those stereotypes must have influenced the rating.
Scouts obsessively record home to first times, so they have real data about how quickly a guy gets down the line, and they will typically also record 60 yard dash times when working out a prospect. Even if we assume that the Statcast data is perfectly accurate, it is measuring top speed rather than the time it takes to travel a set distance, which incorporates acceleration. I never saw Zimmer in the minor leagues so I can’t tell you what his home to first numbers were, but I am confident that scouts recorded them and graded his speed based on that rather than his body type.
So why don’t all scouts record the same speed scores? And why is a guy this fast given a 60? You would think that it’s all just home to first / range in outfield but then this doesn’t make sense.
Because scouts don’t see a guy every day, so their times might vary from one to another. And he’s a 60 because while his top speed may be elite (assuming that Statcast is correct), his acceleration may only be average. I’ve been around scouts and scouting for a long time and I promise you that a big guy who can move is more exciting to them than a small guy with the same speed. I’m not sure why you believe otherwise.
Scouting is objective. Simply that. They use their eyes to grade players for some reason. Sure, stealing bases has to do a lot with getting started quicker, (see altuve) but top speed tends to be a longer mans game.
I’m curious about this too. There sure seems to be an influx of big guys who get to the majors and have unexpected speed appear seemingly out of nowhere. Kris Bryant probably being the best example but even someone like Cody Bellinger who is listed as having 45/40 speed is very clearly much, MUCH faster than that. If I recall correctly, that’s the same grade Bryant maxed out at during his MiLB career. Paul Goldschmidt comes to mind as well, although scouts missed on pretty much everything with Goldy.
These big guys didn’t just get faster overnight going from minors to majors, so how are scouts consistently missing on speed? I suppose you could argue that better coaching and more high tech advanced scouting allows them to be *smarter* runners, thus speeding up their first step on the bases and in the field. That no doubt helps, but even if we’re talking about only top speed running, some of these guys in the 40-60 scouting speed range look legitimately fast.
You do have to wonder if there is some stereotyping going on. People are bigger and faster today than they were 10-20 years ago, big no longer means slow.
Different athletes are coming over from football (and not in the last few years because of the concussion revelation). 50 years ago, Mike Trout would have been a freak linebacker or something.
More chances for participation in basketball, hockey, and soccer, so bigger athletes that would have been pigeon-holed into line positions in football seek other opportunities. There is also more of a “can-do” attitude in youth sports, where just because you are big, doesn’t mean you can’t be quarterback… or centerfield.
US Men’s Soccer got rolled in the World Cup years ago because Czech Rep rolled 6’8″ Jan Koller out at striker… the only US guys over 6’1″ were goalkeepers.
Poor Mikie Mahtook, getting robbed like that twice in one day.
Seeing Jake Marisnick so far down the leaderboard for CF sprint speed seems crazy to me after watching him regularly track down gappers with ease. I guess he just gets good jumps?
Inciarte being even further down, 6th from the bottom(!), is shocking to me. I am shocked.
Seems like shorter strides with long legs would convey a secondary advantage, too: being able to generate better push-off for a leap or dive.
The most stunning catch I’ve ever watched in realtime was Lorenzo Cain in the right-center gap against the Orioles in the 2014 playoffs. I couldn’t believe how much ground he covered or how direct his path was. But as I’ve watched replays over the years, I’ve noticed two things: 1) Cain didn’t make the catch by much, and 2) he didn’t make any kind of leap despite how close the play was. Maybe that’s because he couldn’t. Ernie Johnson kept talking about Cain’s stride length, and it’s true that when he gets up to speed he flies. But it looks like there’s nothing left to launch him toward the ball.
That second catch above from Zimmer suggests there’s real value in choosing a stride that leaves something in the tank. The only question is whether you give up any speed by shortening up, and it sounds like, from what McClelland says, the answer is no. If anything, it’s the opposite.