80% of San Diego Padres are Overweight

I was thinking about Heath Bell using the Wii Fit to drop 25 lbs because it told him he was obese. Even after losing all that weight he is still considered obese. The Wii Fit uses the Body Mass Index to calculate whether you are underweight, normal, overweight or obese. I took it upon myself to use this here BMI Calculator to see how the rest of the Padres fared.

Wii Fit passes judgment quickly and makes your Mii fat with no apologies. I however will make this disclaimer :

One basic problem, especially in athletes, is that muscle is denser than fat. Some professional athletes are "overweight" or "obese" according to their BMI - unless the number at which they are considered "overweight" or "obese" is adjusted upward in some modified version of the calculation.

I should also say that teams and players always lie about height and weight. Why is that? They are so careful to keep accurate stats on everything else but they just don't care when it comes to radar guns and body size. I also doubt all these guys have weights that end in a five or zero.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to pretend I didn't read the disclaimer and that all these guys look like 200 lbs of chewed bubble gum.

80% of Padres players are overweight. 7.5% of players are obese. Only 20% are normal and none are underweight.

Personally I'm glad to see the Padres packing it on. It's no coincidence that the Greatest Padre Who Ever Lived was also the most overweight. Tony Gwynn was 5'11" and weighed 225 at the end of his career and estimates he put on 50 lbs in retirement. That put him at a BMI of 31.4 in his playing days and a 38.4 now. As usual nobody can touch his numbers.

So here's how the rest of the team breaks down. Here come the stats!

Some of these guys are big boned, some have spectacularly large hips for men (Chris Young) but most are just beefcakes. Chase Headley and Cla Meredith just got married which always fattens guys up, so that's their excuse.

[Note by jbox, 02/19/09 9:21 AM PST ]

NC Times:

"I'm in shape," reads one of the T-shirts in Bell's rotation. "Round is a shape."

Listed last year at 240 pounds, Bell ballooned to 275 shortly after the season ended. But by limiting his cookie intake to "binge" days, slashing high-calorie soda from his diet and embracing Nintendo's Wii Fit exercise routine, Bell has shed enough surplus that his size 52 jersey has begun to look baggy.

So if Bell lost 25 lbs, he is probably closer to 250 which would put his BMI at 31.2 which would be the highest on the team.