CRACKS FORMING IN THE "STICKY WALL OF PITCHING"?

Shameless overkill by SI: par for the course.

The question lurking behind the "sticky" pitching situation in MLB '21 is more about injury than it is about cheating (a subject that has haunted those overheated media minds for the better part of a quarter-century). 

Make no mistake: pitchers are cheating. However, what they are doing--as was also the case with those viperous villains from Houston--is actually not helping them as much as folks believe. Added RPM (an overblown stat, since it purports to measure something that has an actual duration in fractions of a second...) is in no way a panacea for pitching success: those hurlers who pursue such a path sacrifice location for movement, only to discover that some pitches just don't move. Hence a rising group of pitchers who give up more homers per hit than in any time in baseball history.

More pertinent to the ongoing fracas about the state of the game--where the age of analytics has pushed hard to join what has become the ongoing American pastime: wall-to-wall distortion--is the fact that a full season's worth of games is being attempted in the aftermath of a world health crisis, which in 2020 limited the baseball season to just 60 games. We have now passed that threshold in 2021, and a breakout of pitcher performance data is suggesting that cracks are forming in the early-season ability to keep batting averages at historically low levels.

Now a "crackdown" on illegal substances, which seems to be getting handled with baseball's utterly bizarre version of kid gloves, may soon be trumpeted as the cause for what looks like a partial meltdown of pitching performance. But other factors are at least as likely for the decline in effectiveness that we've been seeing over the first half of June. For one, injuries and the substitution of inexperienced and ineffective pitchers. For another, some amount of adjustment by hitters that is starting to replenish one of the most depleted commodities in baseball over the past several years: the single.

A look at the monthly ERA figures for teams in both leagues--first in aggregate, then broken out by starters and relievers, shows that the "cracks" to which we allude are, in fact, large fissures in the American League. 

No fewer than nine AL teams have an aggregate ERA over five for the first half of June: the contrast with the number of teams showing such high ERA figures in April and May is stark. (It's even happening to the Yankees and the Red Sox...)

As you'll see, these figures are far less pronounced in the NL, at least thus far. While several AL teams are showing a dramatic and sudden reversal of form in June, most of the NL teams struggling this month are ones who've been doing so all year long (the D-backs, Reds, Rockies and Pirates). Only the Cardinals are showing a sudden reversal of form.

Of course, the interesting thing is that none of the fourteen teams whose team ERAs are ballooning in June is currently in the crosshairs of the frantic exposé that SI and others are fourth-gearing into what is already a highly fraught national conversation about the not-so-grand old game.

So many issues are competing for attention in baseball's malaise that it is becoming genuinely hard to tell the players without a scorecard--or an annotated list of the axes they are grinding (sometimes more than one, simultaneously--more on that in several future installments). Baseball may be escaping one of the slings amidst the flying arrows--that run scoring is anemic. But the problems that the game faces are not solved--and they are not successfully swept under the rug--by a boost in run scoring toward "historically average" levels (another distortion of the facts, led by two highly voluble sabermetricians, who spend most of their time on Twitter engaging in glib misdirection).

No, it's the shape of offense and the attendant rituals that have built up around this bloated variant of baseball that is attenuating the game on the field. For now, though, let's stay on course with the direction that pitching is going now that the year is moving into what promises to be a long, hot summer. 

As you can see, starting pitching is decaying in quality in both leagues. (Some of this is due to the fact that certain teams--the Twins, the Royals, and the four NL suspects mentioned earlier--are getting even worse; but 21 of baseball's thirty teams have an elevated starting pitcher ERA in June.)

Batting average is rising, but there is a seesaw effect in the game right now that has to do with differences in ballparks: thus far in June, it's been a month where the more hitter-hospitable parks have been in play. That will change over the next couple of weeks, so we'll have to check back with the final June numbers to see how it plays out.

Relief pitcher performance is showing a pattern that is much more mixed: NL teams are showing an overall improvement in June, while AL relievers are following their starters into a pronounced funk. If such a pace continues, we might wind up with one of the more pronounced performance differences between the leagues in quite some time (and it won't simply be due to the fact that the NL went back to having pitchers bat, either: that's another canard from that Tango Love Pie™ perpetual deflection machine). 

While the Rays are currently gaining ground on their AL opponents due to the continuation of a stellar run from their bullpen, there are three teams in the NL that are receiving similarly inspired work this month: the Giants (whose press corps has been bemoaning the pen as a weak link since Opening Day); the Cubs (using their bullpen as a primary way to stay in the see-saw race in the NL Central); and the Brewers, who've been waiting for a highly touted relief corps to snap back into shape in order to hold off the Cubs and the now-fading Cardinals.

Injuries are likely to dominate the ultimate outcome of 2021's embattled baseball season, as opposed to the so-called "new steroids" that are hardly the cause (and barely the symptom) of baseball's ongoing hiccup. A saving grace of such uncertainty is that there appear to be no behemoth aggregations lumbering around in either league in '21--no '17 Astros, '18 Red Sox, or '20 Dodgers--a fact that might keep several seemingly unlikely contenders in the chase all the way into the homestretch, an occurrence that would help redeem at least some of what continues to plague a game that has been modeled, Moneyballed, and moralized into the fetal position over a five-year span of ignominy. It is little comfort that baseball has been matched during this by a nation gorging itself on distortion, innuendo, and arrogant self-loathing. As Adam Marsland so eloquently sang, what the world (and baseball) needs now is a good deus ex machina. As we await such an unpredictable prospect, let's say to one another what Bacall said to Bogie in Dark Passage: "Close your eyes, and cross your fingers."