By Nathan Rode
National Supervisor

This weekend marked the start of the 2015 regular season for Division I colleges and Florida high schools. If you’re not keeping up with the Florida Scout Blog, you’re doing yourself a disservice. PBR Florida staffers have already been to several games and have notes on tons of players.

In college baseball, some players that were top prospects in the Prep Baseball Report 2014 Overall Rankings made their debuts. C Evan Skoug, a Libertyville HS, IL, graduate was immediately inserted into the middle of Texas Christian’s lineup. He went 2-for-12 on the first weekend, but had a big Saturday, going 2-for-4 with a home run and three RBIs. LHP Brendan McKay (Blackhawk HS, PA) pitched two innings of relief for Louisville, allowing just one walk and striking out one while showing off his trademark curveball. D1Baseball.com national writer Aaron Fitt reported that McKay was 90-92 while his curveball was 79-81 with “serious depth.” He also got a hit in one at-bat. RHP Alex Lange (Lee’s Summit West HS, MO) was stellar in his first start for Louisiana State, allowing just two hits and a walk over five innings while striking out seven.

On to this week's question...

How can you project that 6-foot-2 is a good height when Pedro Martinez was only 5-foot-11?
Pedro Martinez was one of the most dominant pitchers of his era and will rightfully be inducted into the Hall of Fame this summer. He is also an outlier or an anomaly. He is an exception to the rule. It’s easy to cherry pick one Hall of Fame pitcher with a short stature and question why we say heights like 6-foot-2 are ideal frames. Five-foot-11 is not the average height of pitchers in the big leagues. Using Baseball Reference, you can run queries to look at all kinds of historical data so I had a query run about right-handed pitcher heights. In the post-integration era—so the last 65 or so years—496 righties have logged 1,000 or more career innings. Of those 496, 24 are 5-foot-11. That’s just 4.84 percent compared to 86, or 17.34 percent, that are 6-foot-2.