The Story of Eddie Gaedel

November 16, 2005 | Baseball, General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Eddie Gaedel bats against Bob Cain

I must admit, I’m a fairly unschooled student of baseball history, which is part of the reason why I’m trying to read up on the subject and play around with various baseball databases. Today, on a lark, I decided to try to figure out how tall the average baseball player was (just a tad over six feet), what they weighed (183 pounds) and so on. I then graphed the results, and found a startling outlier: there was apparently a major league player who was 43 inches tall and weighed only sixty five pounds! A short google later, and I found the story of Eddie Gaedel.

Check it out, and then tell me that baseball isn’t a fun game.