Do Guards have a height preference for position players? The short answer is ...

Greetings! I¡¯m Anthony Castrovince. Remember me from when I covered the Cleveland baseball team for MLB.com from 2006 to 2010? No?! Well, that¡¯s rude. I remember you! Anyway, I¡¯m here to guide you through everything happening during Spring Training camp out in Goodyear, Ariz., for a little while until our new Guardians beat reporter takes over. And today, we¡¯re going to go over the long and the short of it¡­

GOODYEAR, Ariz. -- ¡°Here¡¯s an article you should write,¡± a Guardians front office member says one morning on the backfields of Spring Training camp. ¡°You ever notice how so many of our pitchers are giants and our position players are shorter?¡±

Well, yeah, now that you mention it . . .

On the backfields, the teams within the teams assemble. The pitchers are throwing their bullpen sessions and participating in their fielding practices. They operate mostly independent of their position-playing peers, who are fielding fungoes and running sprints and taking BP off machines.

When the pitchers walk past, they ambush your attention. Gavin Williams. Hunter Gaddis. Tim Herrin. Cade Smith. Triston McKenzie. A gigantic kid named Franco Aleman, who seems a nice enough fellow but not someone you¡¯d want to come across in a dark alley. They are all listed at 6-foot-5 or 6-foot-6, and to you, a vertically-challenged scribe with diminutive DNA, it might as well be 7-foot.

So you escape to the comfort and safety of the position-player drills.

Ah yes, these are your people.

Steven Kwan and Jos¨¦ Ram¨ªrez, generously billed to be 5-foot-9. Kyle Manzardo, whose 5-foot-11 listing could be accurate or might include an inch of mustache. Will Brennan, Tyler Freeman and Lane Thomas are all 6-foot? Sure, if you say so.

¡°It shows baseball can apply to all walks of life,¡± Kwan says. ¡°Lefty, righty, tall, short, different ethnicities. I think it just points to how beautiful baseball is.¡±

It also points to what the Guardians value -- overpowering stuff thrown by overpowering people on the pitcher side and contact-prone swatters on the position-player side. When you prioritize plate discipline over pure power (Cleveland has the second-lowest strikeout percentage in MLB over the last four years, behind only the Astros), that can often mean going with the little guy.

That¡¯s how the Guards ended up with so many guards.

Not that this was the deciding factor in the club¡¯s huge decision at No. 1 overall in the MLB Draft last year, but it¡¯s pretty much perfect that Cleveland went with the 6-foot Travis Bazzana over the 6-foot-6 Charlie Condon.

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¡°They talk about three pillars,¡± Kwan says. ¡°Impact quality, swing decision and contact rate. Contact rate and swing decisions, they say are mostly inherent. Impact quality is the thing that they can teach. I think that¡¯s kind of the strategy they have when they draft these kinds of players. Guys with a high baseball IQ who know how to play the game, who put the ball in play and hopefully the power comes later.¡±

That¡¯s what happened with Ram¨ªrez, who, quite obviously, has been used as the internal prototype for what the Guardians want their young players to aspire to.

OK, so let¡¯s put numbers to this. Is the Guardians¡¯ height differential between the pitchers and hitters out of the ordinary?

It is!

Among the players on the club¡¯s 40-man roster, the pitchers average out to 6-foot-4, or one inch taller than the MLB average for pitchers in the 2024 season.

The position players average out to 6-foot even, which is one inch shorter than the MLB average from last year. (Here, the 6-foot-3 Jhonkensy Noel, aka ¡°Big Christmas,¡± saves the Guards from an even punier profile.)

More to the point, the Guardians were the only team in MLB last year with three players who qualified for the batting title and had at least a league average OPS+ while being listed under 6-foot. And they all just so happened to be All-Stars: Ram¨ªrez, Kwan and Josh Naylor.

Sure enough, when the Guardians traded the 5-foot-11 Naylor to Arizona, they immediately replaced him with ¡­ the 5-foot-11 Carlos Santana!

Hey, we all have a type.