Baseball observations

Last night, my son Ethan, who is now 4, and I went to see the Double A New Britain Rock Cats play an Eastern League interleague game against the Connecticut Defenders, the team in Norwich on a seasonably warm spring evening.

It one of those experiences one has in which you could just as well stay home. It was a night game, and I had to be up at 5:30 to go on a day-long field trip to Massachusetts.

We went, though, and had a great time. Of course, we ate a lot of junk food (hot dogs, soda, ice cream, peanuts). We played iSpy around the ballpark, including identifying the giant milk bottle beyond the fence in left-center field. We laughed at the mascots and the between-inning contests. It was quality father-son time. We left in the middle of the sixth inning, which was surprising, especially since my son asked after the first inning, "How much longer is it, Daddy?"

One thing that intrigued me was information displayed on the scoreboard for each batter. Every batter was identified by name, hometown, height and weight.

I wondered about the reason for the height and weight. I mean, how much does this actually tell you? That a guy is big, medium-sized, or small. Beyond that, it doesn't indicate very much about the quality of an athlete, though.

Plenty of men have the same height-weight statistics as professional athletes. Like me. for instance, I am 6'1 1/2" and I weigh 195 pounds. This is misleading, however, because way too much of that weight is centered in the wrong area. I was in my best shape in college, when I weighed about 185.

I think new data needs to be proposed in the place of the height and weight. Tell us the batter's on-base percentage. How many hits does he have? How fast can the guy run 50 meters? What is the team's record when the player plays? While I'm mentioning offensive statistics, I'd rather know the number of runs scored and average than knowing the home runs and RBIs.

For pitchers, provide the ERA, innings pitched, wins, losses and strikeouts.

My point, here, is that we don't need to know a player's height and weight. They are irrelevant numbers that don't mean a thing. A player's age, for instance, would tell us much more.