I have wondered this myself.
It’s Aug. 31st and you are about expand your roster to 40 players. Your team is in a tight playoff race. What’s the smart thing to do? You pencil in a stud dwarf to ride the pine. You bring him in to games when a walk could decide the outcome.
Why no one has done this is beyond me. 
A walk almost never decides the outcome … the number of bases-loaded bottom-of-the-ninth situations are quite small.
And by the way, there is already a player in MLB who is virtually guaranteed to draw a walk every time he comes to the plate. His name is Barry Bonds.
And his team is 8.5 games out of first, so the presence of such a player doesn’t translate into success for the team.
Becuase the commissioner would not allow it and would void the player’s contract - as he has the ability to do.
Zev Steinhardt
It doesn’t matter.
He is there when you need him. He doesn’t have to win the game to be effective. There a lots of situations where a walk simply increases the chances of winning. How about runners on 1st and 2nd with zero or one outs. A walk moves the runners, including having a runner on third to tag up.
With 40 players on the roster, he is not a liability.
zev: We don’t for sure if Bud wouldn’t allow it. No one has tested him on it.
OTOH, there is Harlan Ellison’s riposte to an offended mi… ah, person of meager stature who objected to Ellison’s use of “midget” (and midgets) in a couple of his short stories. He finished with “…we prefer to be called ‘little people.’”
Ellison replied “I am five feet, four inches tall – I am a little person. You, sir, are a midget.”
Of course, WITHOUT Bonds, the Giants would be 15-20 games out of first. They also would not have made the playoffs and won the pennant in 2002 without him, and may not have made the playoffs last year. It may not guarantee you win the pennant, but it does bring success.
The problem with our dwarf player is that he’s not actually anything like Barry Bonds, who walks 40% of his times up but also gets a fair number of hits and belts a homer about one in every fourteen times to the plate, and can run okay. Bonds has driven in 69 runs; our dwarf batter would drive in maybe seven, if he was lucky.
Let’s suppose our dwarf player were to play all 162 games and were to come to the plate 650 times, drawing 325 walks and either striking out or grounding out to the pitcher the other 325. (He would therefore set the dubious record of having the worst batting average in the history of baseball.) Using the runs created formula we know that such a player would, just using the walks and outs, be responsible for creating approximately 60-80 runs, depending on what formula you use.
However, it’s really not that many. Our dwarf batter is a significant problem on the basepaths, where he’s three times slower than anyone else. He’ll be forced out at second on a lot of singles to the outfield and such. You’d have to take off - well, I’m guessing, but 20 runs, easy. In reality, he’s creating 50 runs or fewer, making him a terrible player. You can pinch run for him but then you lose him the first time he gets on base, and you waste a roster spot. And he can only DH.
So could you use him as a pinch hitter just for when the bases are loaded? I don’t think so. The problem with using such a one-dimensional player is that opposing teams will anticipate your move, and hold back their best control reliever to face him. If you can use a control pitcher just to face the dwarf and reduce his OBP to .350, you make him, again, a terrible player.
No way it works.
As I recall from Veeck’s autobiography, BobT and RickJay have it right.
Veeck ordered Gaedel to crouch in the batter’s box, but he stood straight up, making a small but pitchable strike zone.
The catcher got down on his knees to offer Bob Cain a target.
Cain got the first two pitches close to the strike zone, but was laughing so hard after that he couldn’t pitch straight. Gaedel never swung at a pitch.
Immediately after that, the Commissioner’s office announced that henceforth they had the power to review and approve any major league contract.
Today, if an athletic little person were signed as, say a DH for an American League team, I suppose the Commissioner’s office would at least want to see him take batting practice to determine whether he could make a genuine effort.
He could indeed be a liability.
In order to be on the major league roster (whether the limit is 25 or 40 people), you must also be on your team’s 40-man roster. If your 40-man roster is full (as most teams’ 40-man rosters are during the season), you’d have to waive someone from the roster to make room for your little player. That could mean exposing a player to waivers that you’d rather keep, or costing some player on the major league roster an option year.
zev: We don’t for sure if Bud wouldn’t allow it. No one has tested him on it.
[/QUOTE]
True, no one has tested him on it. Yet, I’d be willing to offer dollars-to-doughnuts that he’d void the contract. He can do it simply based on his ability to act in the best interests of the game.
(Aside: I can see a cardboard cutout of Freddie Patek[sup]*[/sup] at every home plate around the league with him holding out his hand at his head and a sign saying “You Must Be This Tall To Bat.”)
Zev Steinhardt
[sup]*[/sup]Freddie Patek was the 5’4" shortstop for the Kansas City Royals during the late 70s.
Legend has it (unsubstantiated, of course) that Veeck told Gaedel that he had a sharpshooter on the roof with orders to shoot if he swung. Somehow, however, that just doesn’t seem to be consistent with the character of Bill Veeck that I’ve read about over the years.
To end the story on a sad note, Gaedel was murdered in 1961. Even Bill Veeck didn’t go to the funeral. The only baseball-related person at the service was Bob Cain, the pitcher he faced.
Zev Steinhardt
I could probably get in trouble real quick for talking about Gary Coleman then couldn’t I?
He’d be a vertically challenged African American, not the thing you said.
And what’s the idea of y’alls assuming that all short people are slow? I did a search for (excuse me) “midget racing” and came up with a ton of cites. I’ve got news for ya. I didn’t take time to read much on the cites but it appears to me that some of them wee folk are pretty fast.
PS… What about catcher? A short person with a good arm could be an advantage. Running bases doesn’t take a Carl Lewis either. Stealing them is not required. I actually knew a short guy that played ball in highschool. He was like 4’2" and was damned quick around the diamond. He almost always got on base too. He wasn’t a power hitter but could get base hits as well as anyone AND yes he walked quite a bit too.
He caught for his brother who pitched. No he wasn’t short also. I don’t know what happened to him after highschool. I kept playing ball with the local men’s league he went to college.
I can’t think of any reason why being short would be an advantage for a catcher.
And all things being equal, a tall person will run faster than a short person. Longer legs = more distance per stride = more speed.
Hijack to the basketball court.
Mugsy Bouges, at 5 ft. 3 inches short, certainly held his own among a land of giants.
Going from this site, a ballplayer’s average 60 yard time is 6.9 seconds. The best I could find for “little people” is the results from the 2003 National Games of the DAAA (Dwarf Athletic Association of America). The best listing was the 13-15 yr olds with first place in the 60m being 10.4 seconds and a national record of 9.43 seconds.
Conveting the yards into meters gives a 60m time for a ballplayer of about 7.6 seconds, which is still much faster than the 9.4 seconds from the DAAA.
Bill Veeck, in his autobiography Veeck as in Wreck, said that he told Gaedel he (Veeck) would be on the roof of the ballpark with a high-powered rifle, and if Gaedel even looked like he was going to swing, Veeck would shoot him dead. Veeck didn’t actually go up on the roof with a rifle - he was just trying to make an impression.
But they just don’t seem to be able to move nearly as fast.
Advantages being able to move better from a standing position to make the throw on base stealing attempts, bunts, pop fouls, finding a wild pitch, whatever… matter of fact I’ve known very FEW catchers that were really tall.
Taller people run faster? Really, I never knew that height was an accurate predictor for speed. (We’re not running for distance.) Carl Lewis is what? 5’ 7" I reckon most NBA players could probably smoke him in a sprint. What about NFL…running backs, most that I recall were fairly short.
BTW IIRC there have been lots of players that weren’t exactly fast who were great. I bet some are even in the Hall of Fame. Think about it.
It doesn’t really matter I suppose…I just don’t like unconditional discrimination against people. Wasn’t there an NBA player that was VERY short by NBA standards. I don’t recall that he had a problem running downcourt with the BIG men.
IIRC he won a dunking contest against Jordan…but noo-ooo he’s too short he can’t play basketball. Spuds sounds right doesn’t it? 5’4"
<swish> 
You didn’t have any little brothers did you. Them little shits are fast. 
EVEN if the bases are loaded, as we all discovered a few years ago in a game against the Diamondbacks. (And it worked, too, as Arizona beat the Giants.)
There does not appear to be any connection between height and speed within the normal heights of baseball players. Rickey Henderson, the greatest baserunner to ever play the game, is 5’10". Willie Mays, who was incredibly fast, is listed as 5’11" but that’s a lie by at least an inch; I’d say he was more like 5’9".
Being short is an advantage for a catcher primarily because being short slightly reduces the strain on the knees in going from a standing to a crouching position. Having said that, it’s apparently not a big advantage, because many of the greatest catchers were over six feet:
Johnny Bench 6’1"
Gary Carter 6’2"
Carlton Fisk 6’2"
Gabby Hartnett 6’1"
Josh Gibson 6’1"
Lance Parrish 6’3"
Elston Howard 6’2"
The A’s in 1974 had a player whose sole job was to pinch-run. As you’ll see here, Herb Washington scored 33 runs and had 31 stolen bases in the major leagues without a single at bat.