Happy Memorial Day readers! Hope you enjoyed yourselves as this great country slowly gets back to business as usual. Restrictions are dropping and cases of Covid are down across the board. People are starting to interact again. All good signs. I myself went to a birthday party on Saturday. One year ago a gathering like that would be unheard of. Last spring, I was going to attend spring training with some friends. Those plans were cancelled as the country went into shut down, literally the day before we were supposed to leave. In July things were looking better and the wife and I were thinking of a trip to San Diego. After the 4th of July weekend cases spiked and things started to go into shut down mode once again so that trip was cancelled. A friend and I were talking about taking the wives to Italy, but they closed the damn country. My buddies and I booked a guy trip, fishing in La Paz in the fall, but decided to cancel that as things were too unstable. So, 2020 was pretty much a lost year for everyone. More of the same this year, although in the second half things might start getting back to normal. So, I’m thinking spring training and La Paz next year and maybe a getaway to Hawaii the end of this year. We’ll see how all that goes.
This is going to be my first baseball blog. I teased a blog about the various rule changes over the last couple of years. Most are COVID related but they seem to be sticking around. The elephant in the room, though, is the altered ball. So I’m going to make a slight change here to talk about that exclusively and save the rule change blog for a little later. I think the new rules are probably here to stay. But I think the altered ball is an anomaly and MLB will be changing it again next season.
The powers that be at MLB were concerned with the number of home runs being hit. Historically baseball has tampered with the ball periodically to create more offense and thus increase run production. During the dead ball era in the early 1900s home runs were infrequent to say the least. Between 1901 and 1920 the most home runs hit in Major League Baseball for a single season were the 669 hit in 1913, and that was a lot. In that same 20 year stretch there were only seven seasons in which more than 400 home runs were hit and only 15 in which more than 300 home runs were hit. Granted it was a different game then. They played fewer games and there were only 16 teams, 8 in each league. And a ball that bounced in the stands was considered a home run, not a ground rule double. Also, they might only use 5 or 10 balls in a game, so the balls were pretty beat up and couldn’t carry as far. These days that many balls, or more, are used in an inning. Still, the 669 home runs hit in 1913 represented an average of 42 home runs per team, or approximately one home run per team every four games.
So, MLB began to tinker with both the rules and the ball. In 1921 a total of 937 home runs were hit. In each of the next six years 800 or more home runs was hit with two years seeing more than 1000 home runs. In 1928 there were 1093 home runs and, except for the 905 home runs hit in 1943, there has never been less than 1000 home runs hit in a season for the last 94 years. In 1950 more than two thousand home runs were hit in baseball for the first time. And yet there were still only 16 teams playing 154 games. Between 1961 and 1966 there was an explosion in home run hitting. The peak was 1962 when 3001 home runs were hit. Consistently, there were roughly 2700 home runs or more hit in each of those seasons during that stretch. Then, in 1967, home run production tailed off to 2299 for the season. An even larger drop occurred during the so-called dead ball season of 1968 when only 1995 home runs were hit. That represents a drop of more than 33% from just two years prior.
The 1968 season has been infamously referred to as the year of the pitcher. That season saw historic lows in batting average (.237), on base percentage (.299), and runs per game (3.42). Numbers not seen since the dead-ball era of the early 1900s. Bob Gibson posted a 1.12 ERA, the fourth lowest in baseball history and the lowest since the start of World War II. Gibson won both the Cy Young and MVP awards in the National League while his counterpart, Denny McLain, won both awards in the American League. Carl Yastrzemski won the batting championship with a .301 batting average, the lowest in history.
It was a two-year trend that saw, not only the emergence of the pitcher, but as a direct corollary, much reduced offensive numbers. MLB decided to do something about it and therefore made two significant changes for the 1969 season. The first change was to reduce the size of the strike zone to an area over the plate between the batter’s armpits and his knees. The second, and arguably more dramatic change, saw the height of the pitcher’s mound lowered from 15 inches to ten inches. A change of only five inches or, put another way, a 33% difference. Did it work? You be the judge. The 1969 season witnessed an all-time record of 3119 home runs. Of course, MLB also added four new teams. For the sake of comparison, there was an average of 130 home runs per team in 1969 versus just under 100 the previous year. And the argument can be made that is with a weakened talent pool due to the addition of roughly 100 roster spots.
As the seasons went on, post 1968, there were consistently right around 3000 home runs hit each year. The low was 1976 which saw just 2,235 dingers with a high of 3,429 hit in 1970. With two additional teams, Toronto and Seattle, entering the league in 1977 there was a corresponding jump in home runs. An aberration in 1987 saw 4,458 home runs. Other than that, most seasons saw home run figures in the mid-3000s. Colorado and Seattle entered the league in 1993 accompanied by another jump in home runs. There were 4,030 long balls hit in that 1993 expansion season. This was followed by 3,306 in 1994 and 4,081 in 1995. Then the following two years saw a large jump in the number of home runs. During the 1996 season a total of 4,962 balls were hit out of their respective ball parks. This was followed by 4,640 in 1997. This signaled the early stages of the steroid era. The uptick in home runs was somewhat masked by expansion in 1998 when Tampa Bay and Arizona entered the league. The 1998 season was the first in Major League history during which more than 5000 round trippers were launched. That 5000 number was surpassed every year until 2007 when ONLY 4,957 home runs were hit. Much of that increase can be attributed to the use of steroids but, by most accounts, steroids had been eradicated from the game by 2003 or 2004. A slight dip in home runs after those years would seem to bear that out. That was the last time the Major Leagues expanded and until 2015 most seasons saw roughly between 4500 and 5000 homers launched. Some years a little bit more, some years a little bit less. During that period there were a couple of seasons where just over 5000 home runs were hit and one year, another aberration, where 5,386 balls were sent over the fence. So, on average, their were usually between 130 to 165 home runs hit per team.
The 2010 season is also sometimes known as a second year of the pitcher. It signaled the beginning of a five year downward trend in offensive statistics. Quite a number of pitching milestones were achieved in 2010. There were six no hitters that season, just one off the major league record of seven. Two perfect games were pitched, all the more astounding when you consider there have only been 23 perfect games thrown in the history of the Major Leagues. That’s one perfect game every six or seven years and 2010 had two of them. There were also 329 shutouts that season. Teams averaged 4.38 runs per game down from 4.61 a year prior. Home run production dropped as well. Prior to the 2010 season MLB saw at least 5000 home runs almost every year. For the 2010 season only 4,613 baseballs left the park and the 5000 home run plateau would not be achieved again until 2016. Offensive production would continue to drop every year until 2014. For the sake of comparison in 2014 teams hit an average of 0.86 home runs and scored 4.07 runs per game. That was the lowest output in 33 years. Five years later, in 2019, teams were now hitting 1.39 home runs and scoring 4.83 runs per game. That was the most prolific home run season ever.
Things really began to change in 2016 when a total of 5,610 home runs were hit. A Major League record which was surpassed the following year when 6,105 home runs were hit. There was a pullback in 2018 to 5,585 but then 2019 saw a huge jump to an all-time Major League record 6,776 home runs. That is over 225 home runs per team. The number of runs being scored was increasing also. Runs scored in the Major Leagues peaked during the steroid era when 23,000 to 24,000 runs scored in five out of seven years. After that there was a slight drop with most seasons seeing 20,000 to 21,000 runs scored. The 2014 baseball season saw 19,761 runs scored with an increase of almost 1000 runs the following season and another thousand in 2016. In 2017 a total of 22,582 runs scored or a little over 9 runs per major league game. There was a drop off of roughly 900 runs the following season. Then the 2019 season saw a total of 23,467 runs scored, a number not seen since 2006.
One of the reasons attributed to the increase in home runs is the nearly universal adoption of the uppercut swing plane which is revolutionizing the way batters approach a pitched ball. This has become increasingly popular among major league hitters since the 2015 or 2016 season. Analytics, the advanced art of statistical analysis, has been able to supply major leaguers with detailed statistics on such things as exit velocities, launch angles, spin rate, etc. Simply put, analytics has determined that a batter has a better chance of getting a hit if he gets under the ball and puts it in the air. And, of course, it follows that he has a better chance of hitting the ball out of the park. As a result, many major leaguers are changing their swing drastically. Instead of striking the ball at a six degree to 8 degree angle, they are now going all out and hitting it at 16 degrees or more. Because of this new hitting philosophy for the past five or six years batting averages have been creeping up, as well as home runs, runs scored, and just about every other offensive statistical category has seen corresponding increases.
Finally, MLB took notice. All of this offense was becoming too much of a good thing. Games were lasting longer as more offense meant more hits, meant more batters, meant more pitches and pitching changes. It was having a snowball effect. Now MLB likes a good offensive show, I mean who doesn’t, but home runs were becoming run-of-the-mill. And this was the major leagues after all, not some kegger soft ball league. So, on February 5th of this year, a memo was circulated outlining the changes in ball construction. Rawlings is the official manufacturer of MLB baseballs and MLB owns Rawlings. The memo stated that the company would loosen the tension of the first wool winding. This would have the effect of reducing COR or the Coefficient of Restitution. This is the relationship between the incoming speed of the ball with the outgoing speed. In layman’s terms it meant the ball would be less bouncy. Small changes can have a dramatic impact. The Korean Baseball Organization in 2019, for example, increased the weight of its baseball 1/20th of an ounce and changed its COR roughly 0.01. The result was a 33% decrease in home runs.
Another change for the upcoming season was that at least 5 more teams have announced that they are going to add humidors to their facilities for baseball storage. That would bring the total number of teams using this approach to at least 10. It has been determined that baseballs stored in humidors reduce home run rates by about 20%.
With approximately 1/3 of the season complete, how has the change in the baseball affected the game? Well, quite dramatically it would appear. For starters, as stated above, the .237 batting average in 1968 was the lowest in history. So far, the batting average for the current season has been hovering at about that level or below. But there have been quite a number of more dramatic changes. Offenses have been shut out a total of 48 times in the first 544 games of the season. Over the course of a full season that works out to over 200 shutouts. Offenses are scoring about 4.3 runs per game, down over 0.3 runs from last season and over a half a run from 2019. Hitters are putting up an OPS of .703, about 40 points lower than last year and 60 points below 2019 levels. Meanwhile, strikeouts are at an all-time high of 9.14 per team per game while hits are at an all-time low of about 7.69 per team per game. In less than 1/3 of the season there have been six no nos, just one off the Major League record for a season. There was actually a 7th no hitter when Madison Bumgarner pitched seven no hit innings for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Unfortunately, it was part of a doubleheader and, per the new baseball rules, both games of a doubleheader are limited to 7 innings, meaning the game did not count as a no hitter.
Obviously pitchers have noticed the difference in the baseball. If you pitch for a living, between pitching sometimes twice a week or more as a bull pen pitcher, warming up before the game, throwing practice between games, and just generally practicing your craft you’re probably handling that baseball over 1000 times a week. You would think that they would notice even minute changes from ball to ball. And they have. One of the most common complaints from past seasons was that the ball was too slick and hard to grip. Universally, this season, pitchers have said the ball is much easier to hold and the seams are slightly raised, which allows them to get a better grip on the ball. As a result, spin rates are up this season. Spin rate is another one of those great tools given up by analytics and measures how quickly the ball rotates. The more the ball rotates the more movement it has on it and the harder it is to hit.
So you would think pitchers would be thrilled with the new baseballs. They are and they aren’t. One thing most pitchers have pointed out is that the balls this season are much more consistent than in past seasons. Meaning in the past there were some irregularities from one ball to the next that a pitcher could feel. Pitchers like consistency so overall the new balls get high marks.
But at least one pitcher isn’t so certain. Multiple Cy Young award winner Clayton Kershaw, of the Los Angeles Dodgers, took MLB to task for tampering with the baseball. “Fans want to see some hits, I get that, and some action, and not too many guys striking out.” He went on to say “I appreciate the attempts MLB has made to deaden the baseball, but it seems like they’ve missed the mark so far. Whatever the intention was with the new ball, it really hasn’t done anything. There might be fewer home runs, which I guess is what they want, but April was one of the worst months in the history of the game.”
Fans have also complained about the lack of offense. For non-purists fewer hits and fewer home runs and more strikeouts add up to a boring game. So what happens next? Well that’s up to Major League Baseball. Obviously 1/3 of the season is too small of a sample and offenses tend to heat up in the warm months in the summer, pun intended. it seems like MLB is making slight adjustments to the ball on an annual basis. Like I said before, small changes can bring big results. Baseball itself is a game of adjustments. A pitcher manages to get through the batting order twice but by the third time around the hitter has made adjustments and starts hitting the pitcher. Unless that pitcher has contemplated the batters making adjustments and has made adjustments of his own. It’s really a game of chess. Using analytics, the hitters have made adjustments in their swing and launch angle. Now it’s time for the pitchers to make adjustments to counter those adjustments. Although, as a fan, I do like the idea of the higher seams allowing for a better spin rate and more movement on the ball. So for now we just wait to see how the rest of the season plays out. After that, Major League Baseball will do what it has always done to protect itself and put out the best product possible. If that means altering the ball once again then I’m sure they will do that. To what effect is the interesting question. The answer will come in 2022.
Next week I’m going to get back to real estate. How do I find the right bank to finance my properties?