May 7, 2011

Offense Continues to Fall

Ten of the fifteen games Friday night saw teams combine for seven runs or fewer. Offense is down 0.6 runs from the same point in the season in 2010, from 9.06 runs per game to 8.44 runs per game.

There’s not much of a power outage, and home runs are down 0.1 per game, or one per ten games played. Walks dropped from 7.2 per game in 2010 down to 6.6 per game in 2011. Non-home run hits suffered a similar drop, from 15.6 to 15.1 per game. That all adds up to about 1.2 fewer base runners per game.

Note that strikeouts are not up very much, although the lack of walks indicate that strike percentage is up. Indeed, pitchers are getting 62.9% of their pitches in for strikes versus 62.3% through the same time last season. Note that this has a very subtle effect on the batters. With pitches more likely to be strikes, batters swing more, 45% this year against 44% last year. Mostly, they are swinging at higher pitches:

MLB swing rate through 2010-5-11.  Heat map: Baseball Analytics

MLB swing rate through 2010-5-11. Heat map: Baseball Analytics

MLB swing rate through 2011-5-6.  Heat map: Baseball Analytics

MLB swing rate through 2011-5-6. Heat map: Baseball Analytics

I ran these two images back and forth in a slide show, and the swing zone is slightly narrower. You can see the higher percentage of strikes above the top solid white line, which represents the strike zone by the rules. You can also see more swings on what would be up and in to left-handers and down and in on right-handers. (This makes no distiction as to which side of the plate is swinging, just location.)

Called strikes moved in the same direction:

MLB called strike rate through 2010-5-11.  Heat map: Baseball Analytics

MLB called strike rate through 2010-5-11. Heat map: Baseball Analytics

MLB called strike rate through 2011-5-06.  Heat map: Baseball Analytics

MLB called strike rate through 2011-5-06. Heat map: Baseball Analytics

Note that there is a trade off here. While the high strike is called more often, the low strike is called less often. We also don’t know cause and effect. Are umpires calling more high strikes because batters are swinging high more often, or did umpires calling the upper edge of the strike zone more force batters to swing high?

Either way, the result is batters swinging at pitcher that are tougher to turn into hits, so offense declined. We’ll see how long it takes hitters to adjust to this new zone.

Thanks to Baseball Analytics for the heat maps.

3 thoughts on “Offense Continues to Fall

  1. Casey Abell

    Sorry to beat a decomposed horse, but year-to-year changes could just be noise. When you take a longer perspective, you can see the drastic enlargement in the strike zone, really in all directions. The strikeout-to-walk ratio has just exploded since the run-scoring peak in 2000, up a whopping 25%.

    There’s no way the hitters can compensate for such a drastic change in the zone. That’s why run-scoring has dropped nearly two runs per game since 2000. I really think it’s far more important than drug testing or even the new pitcher’s parks.

    Something else is dropping, too. (Pssst…it’s ticket sales.) But I don’t want to get into that minefield right now.

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  2. Casey Abell

    Okay, I’ve been too negative on the new scoring-lite game that baseball is putting on the field. Last night even the low-scoring games in the left coast pitcher’s parks offered four exciting walk-off wins. As Bill James commented about Second Deadball Era (1963-72) baseball in his Historical Abstract…

    “If the only baseball that was available was that pitcher-dominated game of the sixties, with day-in, day-out 2-1 games and offenses mostly consisting of waiting for somebody to hit a home run, I’d take it; there are a lot of exciting things that can happen in sixties-style baseball.”

    And there are lots of exciting things that can happen in today’s increasingly convincing imitation of sixties-style baseball.

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  3. pft

    HR’s are down 7% in the AL (after a 16% drop in 2010, which followed a 13% rise).

    AL
    2011-0.90 HR/team game
    2010-0.97
    2009-1.13
    2008-1.00

    Anyways, looks like Bud is having MLB return to 1992 (when he took over), which is low attendance and low runs.

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