It's not what you think.

Managing weight is a huge part of a fighter's life.  For high level fighters with a little money and sophisticated training and nutrition programs, there is an insane amount of attention and effort put into getting a fighter to his division's max allowable weight on Friday night.  

The issue that fans should have with weight divisions and the requisite cutting is not that it is unhealthy or unfair - it's that the weight class system adds a constraint into training that de-optimizes skill and athletic ability.  Sprinters, defensive ends, decathletes, tennis players - weight for these athletes is about optimizing performance.  Ray Lewis weighs 250 lbs because that weight gives him the best combination of power, agility, endurance, and speed, and importantly - maintainability: he needs to have the time and energy to develop the skills and techniques required for a professional football player.  He doesn't drop pounds to be a safety or gain them to be on the line because his body and mind make success as a linebacker much easier - allowing him to refine his skills and reach level of superiority that he'd never reach miscast at another position.

Time spent by MMA athletes fretting and working to meet these arbitrary limits takes time away from technique and skill development, opponent study, and physical training. So on fight night, not only do we see fighters fighting at non-ideal weights, not only do we see them fighting just 27 hours after a drastic, multi-day manipulation of their diet and exercise routine, we see them fighting below their peak potential.  The Jon Jones and GSP we see on Saturday nights are not the best that they have to offer, and this is bad for fans and bad for the UFC.

Is there a better way?

• No weight divisions - not happening, creates worse problems.
• Same day weighing - won't stop cutting
• Weigh "day before" and "day of" and restrict the size of the difference - I still see heavy strategizing and planning occurring with this method. You want to take weight out of the equation entirely - the system should facilitate fighters coming into the cage at the weight that maximizes their fighting ability.

They best I can come up with would be a statistic that incorporates attributes like shoulder-to-fingertip reach, wrist and ankle circumference, shoulder width, ribcage length and width, and maybe a measure of total skeletal bone weight (is this even possible to measure?).  These are physical attributes that you can't change that are semi-accurate indicators of your size potential.  Tack some multipliers on those babies and add them up and create some new divisions.  Fighters have no choice what division they are in - it's decided from the moment they get the physical exam.  Then they just become the best fighters they can be.  (I think there would still be some game theory at play here - fighters looking at the top of their division and tailoring their training towards a body-type that "beats GSP", for instance.)

What do you think?  Am I overstating how much cutting alters the fighter we see in the cage?  Better ideas for matching up like-sized fighters?

The best and worst of 2007 UZR are on Tango's Blog.

Ichiro: 14 runs worse than average
Ibanez: 30 runs worse than average
Guillen: 21 runs worse than average

Hmmmmmmmm...

Ichiro's defense:Mariners fans
as to
Jeter's defense:Mainstream baseball press.

Are we that stupid?
Discuss.

So far in 2007:

Tacoma (Balentien, Clement, Green, Jimerson, Johnson, Jones, Morse, Reed), in 120 plate appearances: .808 OPS

Seattle (Everybody else): .758 OPS

Small sample size, etc, etc; but anyway, those young guys have just killed us, huh Geoff Baker.  I guess that these weak of character, inexperienced fellars somehow found a way to hit the ball in the bigs - and it August and September no less!  Black magic must be involved.

I gotta say, I really don't have any confidence that we'll be any better next year.  We have a lot of declining players still under contract, and can we trust the management to do anything right?

So with the Shankmaster looking to be locked up for three more years, what else is going to happen?

I've been trying to think of ways to find accurate "similar hitters"- kind of like a similarity score- but narrowed down to the type of swing a player has.  I spent the last couple of days organizing data from fangraphs into Excel.  I found all active MLB players with at least 700 career plate appearances (as of last week) and found their career BB%, K%, LD%, FB%, GB%, HR%, HR/FB%, and handedness.  

Take a look here.

This is a lot of fun to play with.  I wonder how much a player's "swing type" factors into these numbers and how much of them is related to how pitchers pitch them...