Nico Hoerner Has Been Lying to You for Years, Was Finally Exposed Monday

[Matthew Trueblood]

Six-foot-one, my ass.

Image courtesy of © Brian Fluharty-Imagn Images

When big-leaguers reported to spring training in mid-February, they all went through a new ritual that (presumably) will become a part of the annual routine, along with posing for a few dozen photos and meeting with developers of MLB: The Show. League officials rolled into each camp and assiduously measured them, taking accurate heights and accepting no manipulations in either direction—be it padding one's height by an inch out of vanity, or underselling it a bit to try to defend a smaller strike zone. With the automated ball-strike (ABS) system being test-driven in the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues this year, accurate heights are required for calibration of the system, so there can be no more fudging.

As it turns out, of the top 14 position players in the Cubs system right now (the 13 who made the Opening Day roster for the Tokyo Series, plus the injured Nico Hoerner), there are only four honest men. Kyle Tucker and Gage Workman stand a true 6-foot-4; Jon Berti is a legitimate 5-foot-10; and Justin Turner has had the courage, all along, to admit that he's one inch shy of that magical 6-foot threshold.

While you might assume everyone else would be shorter, though—after all, before the advent of an automated zone, most of the social pressures and incentives would lead a player to slightly inflate their height, as anyone who's ever tried a dating app would tell you—the reality is that four of the other 10 Cubs got taller when heights were officially updated Monday. Let's talk about them, first.

• Seiya Suzuki, another player who had no problem admitting to being 5'11", never needed to be so modest. He's officially 6'0" now.
• Pete Crow-Armstrong, with whom it seems safe to rule out modesty as a motivating factor, allowed himself to be listed at 5'11" before this spring, but he, too, is now an even 6 feet tall.
• Miguel Amaya rises from 6'0" to 6'1".
• Little Matt Shaw isn't as little as we all thought: He's been listed at 5'9", but is now officially 5'10".

These numbers both do and don't matter, of course. As the 5-foot-7 Jose Altuve and the 6-foot-7 Aaron Judge have so famously demonstrated to us, baseball lends itself to different flavors of success from players of very different sizes. However, that doesn't mean height doesn't factor into either evaluations or actual performances. There can be lots of fudging in the middle range of player heights, so don't read too much into the tallest columns in this chart, but consider the numbers of players 5-foot-8 (or shorter) and 5-foot-9 who have had above-average offensive seasons in the last 15 years, and compare it to those who are 5-foot-10 or 5-foot-11.

So, Shaw no longer being in that column second from left (however trivial it might seem) does raise his ceiling a bit, actuarially. It's also interesting to note that Shaw and Crow-Armstrong are both on this list; it's possible one or both have genuinely grown an inch since the last time their heights were officially measured. At 23 and 22 respectively, they're still at an age where that can happen.

Here's the list of those who were standing on tiptoes when they got measured in the past, or who just gave driver's license heights and hadn't been called on it until now:

• Vidal Bruján, who didn't have it to lose, gives up an inch, going from 5'10" to 5'9".
• Michael Busch, whom we all understood to be a bit short for first base, is that bit shorter, dropping from 6'1" to 6'0".
• Ian Happ's claim to be 6 feet is kaput; he joins Turner in the land of the 5'11".
• Nico Hoerner, who had absolutely everyone no one fooled, is not 6'1", as previously listed, but 5'11". He's the only Cub whose height gets a two-inch adjustment in either direction.
• Carson Kelly has been squatting too many years. Maybe he was once 6'2", as he'd been listed, but that was with all the cartilage in his knees and no pain hunching his back. Now, he's 6'1".
• Dansby Swanson, like Busch, gets to stay in the 6-footer club, but loses the extra inch he'd had above the line.

It's a bit of a relief to stop pretending Hoerner is a big guy, even for a second baseman. He's sturdily built, and (this is what really sets him apart, because every big-leaguer this side of Nick Madrigal is much broader and stronger than you think) he carries it in a way that makes that easy to see even from a distance, but he's not big by big-league standards. That's part of why he doesn't generate the power some fans have long hoped and expected that he would. Hopefully, we can all now acknowledge that he never will, and lean into a better understanding of the kind of great player he can be: OBP, speed, and defense all the way.

To me, these updates are interesting, because better information makes for better comprehension of the game. While the significance of any given player's height (and especially any change in that number) is likely to be minor, it's been hard to fully grasp the value of that datum until now, because we always knew there was so much noise in it. Now, if nothing else, we can trust the numbers enough to figure out just where and why height does factor into performance, in a more rigorous way. Plus, we can all chuckle a little at the idea that Hoerner was on the high side of six feet tall. Maybe in his cleats and with his coif in full bloom, he still is.

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[Michael Trzinski]

Nice change-up, Matt. This one came in at about 75...lol.