![]() ![]() ![]() That year, FiveThirtyEight published a study on how “relievers have broken baseball” because “more relievers mean more strikeouts.”īaseball Prospectus encompassed that idea and more in a widely salient and oft-cited piece, titled “We Need a Restrictor Plate for Pitching,” addressing the primary problem with the sport: “Pitchers are increasingly dominating a majority of hitters, and hitters are dominating a minority of pitchers and mistake pitches, in an increasingly all-or-nothing game.”īut you watch baseball, so you already know this, or at least the gist of it. Starting in 2019, MLB tried to cap the number of pitchers a team could carry on its active roster to stem the tide of guys with otherworldly stuff coming out of the bullpen one inning at a time. The 2022 season ended with the lowest league-wide batting average since 1968, the Year of the Pitcher - even though 2022 was the first year of the universal designated hitter and the year after the league cracked down on sticky stuff in an effort to curtail pitchers’ runaway dominance in what had been widely dubbed the Year of the Pitcher, Part 2. ![]() In May 2022, ESPN published a thorough and damning look at the total absence of offense just a month into the season, when teams were “scoring the fewest runs per game in four decades, posting the worst OPS in more than 50 years and hitting for the lowest batting average ever one month into the season.”ĭrawing attention to it didn’t fix anything, of course. But you don’t have to go that far into the weeds to see how the scoring environment - by which I mean the lack thereof - has been a growing crisis in the game. Last year, I wrote (along with Zach Crizer) about the cutting edge and somewhat surreptitious technology teams were employing in an effort to give their hitters a fighting chance against the modern pitcher’s all-but-unhittable arsenal. ![]() This has been an interest of mine for a while - hitting has always been a study in failure, yet modern advancements have focused, for good reason, on optimizing getting outs. ![]()
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