Not to pour on too much haterade, but if his shoulder is still screwed AND he’s smaller AND he’s less comfortable with his swing, he could definitely do worse. Of course, we’d never expect him to play under those conditions, but the pressure to see results might coerce Wedge into playing him sooner than he should (even if subconsciously).

But, as we’ve discussed, we can really only speculate on Hafner until we start to see some play out of him.

Imprecise wording in my headline.

“Rotoauthority finds no relationship between weightloss & performance improvement” would have been more accurate.

I don’t think I’d call it anecdotal, just statistically meaningless. It would take a LOT more data and a much more nuanced set of categorizations to be able to find any sort remotely predictive trends for a specific set of circumstances.

Long story short, I think what the author was trying to demonstrate was that there is specific evidence contrary to the “cliche” that intentionally trimming weight or intentionally bulking up leads to performance improvement.

Looking at what we can take away from this, I’d point out that many here (I believe) correctly pointed out the public relationsiness (new word!) of the Hafner losing weight story. That story attempted to prey on the idea that this article disputes, that if a player is intentionally changing his body weight then it’s a good thing. This article does a passable job of, given one year of data, demonstrating that no such trend is evident.

This article also references a statistically sound piece that correlates body mass to power by age group. That, too, speaks to our situation with Hafner. He’s not as big, expect even less power. It’s an obvious conclusion, but it’s part of shaping expectations for 2009.

Are they run out of two separate Mom’s basements, or just the one?

I have to say, Tim’s running list of Spring Training cliches is a pretty great and totally original piece of content.