The FOMI (Fat Old Man Index)

Ryan's popular post from the other day got me thinking about the fattest teams in baseball. The list he discussed was actually the heaviest teams, but I was curious to see which team truly is the fattest, so I ran the calculation for each team's body mass index. Unfortunately, that wasn't a whole lot of fun either, because the White Sox were still the clear winners at the nearly obese 29.3 rating. Also, 21 teams have an average height of 6'1" while 7 are 6'2" and the shorty Astros and Giants are 6'0", so the BMI's pretty closely followed the weights. So since ESPN.com conveniently provides the teams' average ages, I decided to take this a step further....

...I came up with the Fat Old Man Index (FOMI) to see what teams had the fattest, oldest guys. All I did was simply multiply the team BMI by the average age, so for you math junkies out there, the expanded equation is FOMI = Age*((WT*703)/(HT^2)). The Fattest, Oldest team is still the White Sox, scoring a 861, but now coming in at 2nd with 855 is the 6th lightest team in the league, the Astros, who shoot up the list for being one of the 2 shortest teams and also being the oldest team in baseball. The Rays and Marlins are at the bottom of the list, 2 young, tall, skinny teams.


The only trend I could really tell from this list (because success has nothing to do with it when you have the White Sox and Red Sox at the top with the Astros, and the Rays and Marlins on the bottom with the Royals) is that the old, fat teams seemed to get paid a lot more than the young, skinny teams, and that seems to make sense. Power hitters are typically bigger and get paid more, and lower paid teams usually have a lot of young guys because they are just happy to be in the majors. But you can see from the list the added bulk and experience doesn't have a whole lot to do with success this year. In fact, salary doesn't have much an effect on success any more either, but that's another math-filled post for another day.....