So little time, so many spinning plates...we've been spending much time plotting our moves for 2023 film shows--so much so that the task of verifying the decade-by-decade breakouts in the Top 300 first half performances just kept slipping through the cracks. And then there was the new year, which has brought us Kevin McCarthy's farcical engagement with the Mendoza Line...
...but we've managed to get past all that at last, so without further ado, here are the counting numbers for various statistical categories associated with the Top 300 first half super-achievers (as measured by league-adjusted on-base plus slugging, or OPS+). These are broken out by decades, as you'll soon see...
You can compare these raw numbers to what we presented back on 11/20/22 for the Top 300 second half behemoths by clicking on the link in this sentence. You'll note the patterns are similar, but not identical...and you'll note that the "trough" in high-end offensive performance occurs in the same place for both: the 1980s.
Of course, this data is more intelligible (if not useful) when it is presented in "percentage of totals" format, so we'll move right on and slap that up here for you right now:
Now we can see the patterns in the data, many of which will remind you of what we saw previously in the "second half" breakouts. The batting average for Top 300 members has shifted over time from the .350-.399 range into the .300-.349 range; OBP has been steadily a .400-.499 range since the dawn of recorded baseball time; SLG spiked highest when coupled with the first offensive explosions in the 1920s/1930s and had a brief "return to center stage" in the trailing edge of what some still like to call "the steroid age." The number of HRs hit in the first half by these hitters has leapfrogged dramatically in recent years due to two factors: 1) the increased emphasis on hitting HRs, "launch angle," and other associated claptrap; 2) the institutionalization of an early April/late March start to the season, which places more games in the first half.
There is no one decade that is "most representative" of the game as seen through this lens of achievement, because the patterns have shifted back and forth rather in the fashion of a clenched fist.
We might get a better sense of the overall pattern, as was the case with the second half data shown back in November, by bundling most of the decades into two (with the exception of the 1960s...as Barbara Stanwyck said about Charles Coburn in The Lady Eve: "and what an exception!")
We'll post this chart in tandem with the second half chart at some point soon; in the meantime, here are some takeaways from the above.
First and foremost, it's officially impossible for a low-power hitter to generate enough OBP these days to push themselves into the Top 300: remember, that <10 HR column at the far right of the green-colored columns represents only half a season! (This falls in line with our observations some years back in the late, lamented Hardball Times Baseball Annual, as outlined in any essay entitled "In Search of the Anomalous Superstar.")
Second, 20+ HRs in a half season is now the norm for anyone in the Top 300, a trend that first surfaced in the low offense 60s and seems to again be de rigeur for anyone in the 2020s (looking like a decade of falling offense). 61% of the hitters in the Top 300 in the 60s met or exceeded the 20 HR+ half-season; as you can see in the breakout at bottom (the two halves of baseball history), that total is 64% since the dawn of expansion, and is more than double the rate for the 1900-1959 period.
(Note again that these figures are more pronounced than in the case of the second half data because more and more games are played prior to the All-Star break now.)
And finally, note that to make the Top 300 these days, it's pretty imperative that you have to be able to slug .600+ one way or another...and most of the time that's hitting a lot of HRs.
What's reassuring in all this is that a half-season is enough elapsed time, baseball-wise, to prevent hot streaks from creating truly freakish stat lines that might show up in the data. Fortunately, it's almost as tough to slug .700 for a half-season than it is do it for a full season--and given everything else we seem to be experiencing in this age of spinning plates, that qualifies as mental comfort food in a world where "leaders" seem to excel mostly in hurling their plates against the wall.
