WE continue with the arrows and slings (a great name for the eventual expansion franchise in Singapore, by the way) still being flung about in the little world of baseball related to batting average, isolated power, the infamous "Three True Outcomes," and the long bias in sabermetrics that has penetrated into baseball front offices in favor of the low-average slugger.
As we've noted elsewhere, the underpinnings for all this have to do with two fundamentally incompatible impulses--the desire to create a model-based "field theory" for player value, and the fear that grips those who make their living in support of the baseball industry that it will regress and collapse if pitching continues to evolve faster than hitting, thus plunging the game back into the bottomed-out run scoring levels of 1968.
Kudos to Jayson Stark for saying out loud what others merely tip-toe around: baseball was (and may still be, despite the rules changes) headed for a revisitation of 1968. Jayson focused on the decline of the single (a topic we broached several years ago) and how that was an ominous sign for the health of the game. In many ways, he actually undersold the problem (in 1968, with hitting at an all-time low, there were still 5.9 singles per game; the end of the offensive explosion and the descent into what we've been facing of late can be traced to the relentless decline in singles that first dropped back below six per game in 2009, slowly dropped below the 1968 value thereafter, and went into free-fall with the advent of the "launch angle follies" in 2016-17, until it flirted with the five-per-game barrier in 2020).
THINK of this as the flip side of the chart in the previous post. Since the veneration/adulation of the low-average slugger has been so virulent over the past thirty years, we upped the ante just a bit with this data conglomeration, bumping up the quality level for low-average (.240 or less) hitters to 110% of league average (as measured by OPS+).
What you see here is that such hitters barely existed until after WWII, and didn't become a regular feature of the baseball landscape until the strike zone change in 1963. Most of the players who fall into this category in the 1963-72 period are established sluggers whose batting averages were dragged down by the cumulative effects of the bigger strike zone, but their existence created a lingering effect that was a premonition of things to come. (The spikes on the chart echo Stark's admonition: the orange-colored label is 1968, the red-colored label is 2022. The spike in 1985 is due to a flukish drop in the overall category of .240- BA hitters, and an upswing of sluggery types who exceeded 110 OPS+ that year.)
This was interrupted (temporarily) by the offensive explosion, which bottomed out the low-average slugger for about fifteen years, until singles started to crash and batting averages began their serpentine descent toward .240. (All the while, of course, our "friend" the Tango Love Pie was decrying batting average as "meaningless". Despite his relentless attempt to dominate the conversation, it's clear that .240 became the Maginot Line for most of the insiders--and when the ping-pong effects of bloated bullpens and launch angle tactics collided in tandem with the rise of Trump, the game's "numerical moral compass" followed social trends and took a rapid nosedive.)
This chart makes it clear just how precipitous the climb was for the low-average slugger as a result of the strike zone change in 1963--it's nearly a vertical jump from 1960 to 1968. And note that the measures put into place as part of the massive expansion that occurred in 1969 took a few years to subside, bringing us into the speed-dominated game of the 1970s. The turnaround from that game takes place in 1985, is amped by a homer spike in 1987 which carries over the home run approach through the end of the decade. There's then a kind of stepwise decline in effective low-average sluggers, which is ratified and extended as a result of the offensive explosion, which raises batting averages to their highest level since the late 30s. It bottoms out in 2005--just at the point that "analytics" begins to impose itself from the neo-sabe offensive into a majority of baseball front offices. The running five-year average since then shows an almost unbroken rise of the effective .240- BA slugger, as the ideology took hold and slowly but surely eroded the historical norms.
Again, Stark's admonition is affirmed: 2022's five-year average (representing 2018-22) is the highest in baseball history, pushing past the former peak set in 1968-70.
IT's important to note that this is not simply some inchoate historical "drift" we're talking about. It's a conscious (or, at least, "semi-conscious") advocacy for higher ISO relative to batting average--to the point where the former had become so detrimental to the latter than it created a game that was as sluggish as it was sluggerish. Baseball, as is the wont of many compromised institutions in America, is treating the symptoms by imposing a pitch clock--the statistical changes emerging from the clockification and the elimination of the shift have resulted in notably greater increases in doubles and homers and not in singles (up only 1% over the 2022 figure as of this morning).
Bill James refuses to engage with the larger scale issues, apparently waiting for offense to dip closer to the 1963-72 "crater" before coming to grips with the situation. Mr. Love Pie is still banging the drum for "barrels" and decrying batting average as "meaningless." ISOBA (the ratio of isolated power to batting average) is at or near its highest level in baseball history.
Bad idea, guys.
What the game needs: a lot more Luis Arraez and a lot less Tango Love Pie.
