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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

I used to be curious about why it seemed like most baseball pitchers and quarterbacks (though certainly not all!) are white. What could it be, genetically, socially or culturally that would make white people have better arms?

I stopped asking because people thought it was racist. It always baffled me.

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What could it be, genetically, socially or culturally that would make white people have better arms?

In the American population there is actually a genetic difference: For any given height, the average black Americans has longer legs, while the average white American has a taller chest and longer arms.

The other sport where this has a significant influence is swimming.

Do you have proof for that statement?

They probably thought it was racist because the thing that makes a great quarterback (for example) isn't just an incredible arm. There are many more factors that go into it, and I'd wager the reason so many black quarterbacks get weeded out at the collegiate level is because their superior physical prowess is better utilized in other positions that rely more on speed, power, explosiveness, etc.

I mean, you've got a guy like Peyton Manning for example. He's not an athletic guy relative to other NFL players, but historically he has this incredible hand-eye coordination and mind for the strategy of the game. No one was going to look at Manning and say, "Hey you know, you have a great arm and are frighteningly smart at this game, but we could use your slow clumsy ass at running back."

To me quarterbacks and pitchers specialize into that position because oftentimes their other physical gifts don't even come close to their arms. In other words, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of black QBs out there in high school football teams who have the potential to be just as great as Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, etc., but coaches are going to want the speed and power elsewhere.

Your post implies that QB is a leftover position, which i think is far from the case. If there's a player that can be as great as [insert list of famous QBs], that player's going to be a QB...he isn't going to get promoted to a better position where he can have more impact (because there is no other position).

> black quarterbacks get weeded out at the collegiate level is because their superior physical prowess

I thought this article was pointing out how racial prejudice around 'athleticism and blacks' was out right false. So then you justify a separate athletic ability using race again...

> I thought this article was pointing out how racial prejudice around 'athleticism and blacks' was out right false.

That's what the article wants to do, but it doesn't succeed. We know that elite "black" athletes are the best. Maybe the average black athlete is worse than the average white, but there's no evidence of that presented. It could be that blacks have a larger standard deviation, or it could be that blacks have a higher mean. The author couldn't be bothered to actually try and answer that question.

Thats's the first explanation for it that has actually made sense to me. good one.

With ~6 starting black NFL QBs they are actually over-represented (with respect to the population of the US). They're just under-represented compared to the population of football players.

Anyone remember the NFL spoof video "We Are Kickers" that Saturday Night Live did in the 80's poking fun at kickers being of a certain ethnicity? I want to say middle-eastern, but I can't remember for sure. If I followed the sport at all, I'd probably know. I tried to find it on Youtube, but couldn't.

Anyway, it seems that certain ethnic groups have long been perceived to gravitate towards certain athletic functions.

The article makes a good point that yes, that idea is racist, because you explicitly chose to look first at the correlation between sports performance and race, rather than other, far more finegrained and predictive factors. If it weren't a visually obvious and culturally ingrained distinction, nobody would bother with such a poorly-defined coarse-grained factor.

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