Due to the hectic schedule of the last day of the regular season and the start of the wild card round, I did not get a chance to do a final Weekly Look at Baseball. The 2024 came in at 8.79 runs per game compared to 9.23 runs per game in 2023, a 0.44 runs per game drop. Hits, home runs, walks, and hit by pitches were all down on a per game basis. When I looked at the totals, however, it struck me that the lost about 1000 hits compared to the previous season, 1017 to be exact. This is after gaining 1163 hits from 2022 to 2023.
Note these are the three seasons of the universal designated hitter (DH). The first season with the DH for all teams added less that 200 hits. The implementation of the anti-shift rule in 2023 appeared to open up the field to more hits, but that disappeared in 2024.
It turns out that this is a much longer trend. Looking at total hits during the 30 team era (1998-2024, excluding 2020), the majors saw about 5000 hits disappear. The graph at this spreadsheet shows the trend over that time, with the slopes of the trend lines. We are losing on average 200 hits per season. Home runs showed mild growth, with the slope showing an average increase of 18 home runs per season. It’s the other hits that keep disappearing at a rate of 219 per season.
What really is distressing is that strikeouts were down in 2024 compared to 2023. More balls were put in play, but they tended to be turned into outs.
Why is this happening? For a long time, people blamed the shift, but the anti-shift boost lasted for just one season. Note that average launch angle, after plateauing for a few seasons, jumped from 12.8 degrees in 2023 to 13.3 degrees in 2024. Fly balls that don’t leave the park tend to come down in gloves. This season I noticed that outfielders seemed to be making incredible plays. They were extremely fast, extremely good jumpers, sliders, and divers. It really struck me that there were few bad outfielders. No one seems to be hiding a lead footed slugger in leftfield anymore.
I tend to discount my perceptions of such things. It’s easy to cherry pick places of find moments that confirm a bias. Looking at FanGraphs defensive numbers for outfielders over the last ten seasons, 2024 produced 900 more putouts than the next closest season. (That’s very close to the 1000 hits lost.) It makes me wonder if teams found that better outfield defense was worth giving up a slugger.
The disappearing hits is a serious problem for baseball. People like to see the ball put into play, and they also like to see a decent number of the them all for hits. MLB had a brief fix for this in 2023, but the problem is back, and it’s very tough to fight a long-term trend.