The status of hitting in MLB

[T.G.]

Take a look at the year by year batting averages for major league baseball

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/bat.shtml

This year it was a pathetic .243

OBP was a crappy .312

You can sort those numbers from high to low or low to high...  Compare the numbers to previous years.  It's eye opening.

How come averages and on-base percentages are trending down? 

[AngelsLakersFan]

Just now, T.G. said:

Take a look at the year by year batting averages for major league baseball

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/bat.shtml

This year it was a pathetic .243

OBP was a crappy .312

You can sort those numbers from high to low or low to high...  Compare the numbers to previous years.  It's eye opening.

How come averages and on-base percentages are trending down? 

It's a lot of things. #1 for me is the rise of the reliever. Teams have discovered that a replacement level reliever is more effective than a typical starting pitcher the third time through the order. Rosters have expanded to include more relievers in place of position players, and these guys are all going to DriveLine to learn how to throw harder over shorter periods of time. 

Beyond that there is certainly the issue with batters learning that trying to hit the ball hard pays off more than trying to hit the ball. This has lead to more strikeouts, and a lot of pulled contact on the ground that the shift has been deployed to convert into outs.

[Angel Oracle]

6 minutes ago, AngelsLakersFan said:

It's a lot of things. #1 for me is the rise of the reliever. Teams have discovered that a replacement level reliever is more effective than a typical starting pitcher the third time through the order. Rosters have expanded to include more relievers in place of position players, and these guys are all going to DriveLine to learn how to throw harder over shorter periods of time. 

Beyond that there is certainly the issue with batters learning that trying to hit the ball hard pays off more than trying to hit the ball. This has lead to more strikeouts, and a lot of pulled contact on the ground that the shift has been deployed to convert into outs.

Especially the main INF in the shift playing at shallow OF depth, who knows how many hits were taken away due to that.

A litany of hard throwing relievers are here to stay.

The removal of the shift though should allow improvement in the overall MLB BA.

1968 was too low scoring.

The late 1990s had TOO much offense.

Just need a happy medium.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Angel Oracle

[Revad]

There is the baseball itself, which varies from year to year.  Maybe next year it will be a lively ball again.  Plus sticky substances are back and so spin rates are up.

[Reveille1984]

Yeah, the reliever dominance is insane.  Velocity just keeps increasing, and less IP for SP allows them to be more effective.  We're going to get to a point soon where relievers are pitching half the game on average.  

Just some crazy stats for relievers in 1993 vs 2021 (about a 30 year span):

1993:
RP IP: 12777
RP% of all IP: 31.5%
Reliever K/9: 6.5 
WAR: 63

2021:
RP IP: 18212
RP% of all IP: 42.7%
Reliever K/9: 9.3 
WAR: 108

[full circle]

All of those.  Plus the high strike now being called.  No one swings level to be able to handle that pitch.  

[Blarg]

Hard to hit the pitch swinging level. 

[full circle]

1 hour ago, Blarg said:

Hard to hit the pitch swinging level. 

Probably been a while since you swung at anything.  A high pitch requires a more level swing.  

[Tank]

Look at the growing number of pitchers that can hit 100 mph, not to mention all the other hard throwers at 95+ mph. 

[Angelsjunky]

On first glance,  that isn't far off from recent years. 2022 saw teams score 4.28 Runs/Game. That's the lowest since 2015 (4.25), but higher than 2013-14 and basically the same as baseball in the 1970s and 80s. Runs scored has tended to oscillate throughout baseball history, but the point being that run scoring context of 2022 is similar to much of the DH era - at least until the Roid Era of 1994-2009. 

But the above doesn't account for the addition of the DH to the NL this year, which makes the fall in offense look smaller than it actually is. If we look at the AL only, we see that in 2022 teams scored 4.22 Runs/Game, which is the lowest since 2014 (4.18), which is close to the gap in years for MLB as a whole.  But to find another season lower than 2022, you have to go all the way back to 1978, and to find seasons that are consistently lower you have to go back to 1972, which was the last year without a DH in the AL.

So for most of the DH era (1973-2022), or from 1979, only one year (2014) saw fewer runs scored per game in the AL.

Why this is, has been touched upon by others. I'm guessing that it equalizes a bit, and that we'll see offense rise again. Baseball history involves a kind of dance between hitters and pitchers, where pitchers take a step forward, and then hitters catch up (or vice versa). Sometimes there are external adjustments that impact this: the raising of the mound, the DH, etc. As Scotty and others have pointed out, pitchers are throwing the ball harder than they've ever been before.

For instance, the average fastball was 93.6 mph in 2022, which was the highest in the two decades of consistent and reliable measurement. The second highest ever was 2021 (93.5), then 2019 and 2020 (both 93.1). This has been a gradual trend up. So if the average fastball is now approaching 94 MPH, in 2004-05 it was around 90 MPH. In 2002 it was 89.0 - that's the first year with good data, at least according to Fangraphs. 

So in a span of 20 years, it has increased by over 4 MPH. That is a HUGE difference...as we all know what happens to a pitcher when their velo drops by that much or more (see, "Weaver, Jered").

We don't have the data, but it makes you wonder how hard they were throwing in the first half of the century. Even accounting for a non-linear increase in speed, and considering that the higher the number, the less of a % increase each MPH is, it could be that before World War 2, the average fastball was below 80 MPH. Crazy to consider. I don't know if that's true, and my guess is that it was a much slower rate of increase earlier on, but I do think it has increased over the entire span of baseball history. That's just how athletics work: Sprinters run faster and faster, and pitchers throw faster and faster. Maybe earlier eras saw outliers, so perhaps Bob Feller threw 100 MPH or Pancho Gonzales served 140 MPH, but I'm guess that Feller never threw a pitch 105 MPH like Aroldis Chapman and Hunter Green have (or Ben Joyce), and Sam Groth has served as high as 162 MPH.

My wild guess is that the average speed was something like 70-75 MPH in the 19th century, then up to around 80 MPH by the 1920s, then 85 MPH by the 60s, and slowly upward from there, with recent years seeing a bit of a spike. But who knows.

This shows up especially in terms of contact--decreasing BA and increasing SO for hitters. For instance, the median SO by all qualifying hitters in 1985 was 76, compared to 119 in 2022. That's a massive increase.

Edited October 8, 2022 by Angelsjunky