Is Nophysique Hitting for Average, or Is Each Hitter Average Now?

The .300 hitter is dying, Ian Crouch wrote in The New Yorker in 2014. And Bradford Doolittle on ESPN.com in 2019. And Barry Svrluga within the Washington Post simply final month. If the .300 hitter is dying, it’s dying the identical method you and I are, a little bit bit every day. Maybe the .300 hitter is simply sick.

Why do these tales maintain getting written? Well, final week I used to be checking in on Luis Arraez (come on, dude, I assumed you had been going to make a critical run at .400!) and got here to the startling realization that solely 9 certified hitters are on tempo to hit .300. Nine! I can’t think about being a baseball author, seeing that reality, and never being freaked out sufficient to write down about it.

Baseball is a sport that bought its tentacles into the American standard vernacular one thing like 100 years in the past, dropping idioms like eggs. “Three strikes,” “home run,” “lost his fastball,” and dozens of others. “Batting 1.000” might be a extra standard phrase than “batting .300” or “hitting .300,” however the latter remains to be legible to individuals who suppose Christian Walker is what you name pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago.

What was as soon as an attainable normal is now an outlier efficiency, even in comparison with 2014 and 2019, when there have been 17 and 19 .300 hitters, respectively. Even roping within the different two triple slash classes, it’s simple that we’re in a drought:

The 2014 New Yorker article got here out on that second-most-recent downslope on that graph. See, at the moment, .300 hitters weren’t a lot rarer than that they had been for many of the growth period, however in comparison with the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, they had been virtually an endangered species. And what would trigger that period to be a historic anomaly when it comes to offense? Everyone say it collectively: growth and PEDs. Yes, that’s proper, superb, class.

That chart reveals the traits you’d anticipate from what we learn about evolutions in league-wide offense. See that massive bounce within the variety of hitters who slugged .500 in 2019? I don’t suppose you may truly draw “juiced baseball” on a line graph, however this isn’t a lot much less apparent.

In reality, utilizing the proportion of certified hitters over a sure threshold, these variations are much more apparent than they might be utilizing league common stats alone:

But once we’re in search of .300/.400/.500 hitters, the league common stats may be instructive. I don’t know if saying it’s “easier” or “harder” to hit .300 in a sure yr is the correct method to put it. Certainly a .300 hitter needs to be higher, relative to common, when the league-wide batting common is .245 than when it’s .265.

And there’s no denying that we’re in a historic batting common trough. The league-wide common, .249 as of this writing, has been beneath .250 5 occasions prior to now six seasons. Before that, the final time it was below .250 was 1972, or the yr earlier than the American League launched the designated hitter. In 1999, when the league-wide batting common was .271, greater than a 3rd of certified batters hit .300; this yr, it’s down to six.4%.

Slugging proportion may be much more risky — from 1988 to 1992, the league-wide common SLG was by no means greater than .385. In 1994 (say it once more, growth and PEDs), the league slugged .424. The league didn’t slug below .415 once more till 2010.

Some of those historic run atmosphere fluctuations are sufficiently big that you just’d discover them on a day-to-day, and even plate appearance-to-plate look stage. Other occasions — and that is what occurred to me — you simply go about what you are promoting not suspecting something, after which swiftly solely 9 guys are hitting .300.

I believe that this will fly below the radar as a result of in the event you watch baseball you perceive what’s common, what’s a little bit higher than common, what’s a little bit worse, and so forth. This is the premise for all these percentile rankings on Baseball Savant, stats like wRC+, and even the 20-80 scouting scale. Knowing a quantity in isolation is much less helpful than figuring out the way it compares to the remainder of the league.

Just counting the .300 hitters yearly is a enjoyable little bit of trivia, and I feel there’s a fairly good argument that the idiomatic worth of the quantity outweighs any want to regulate that normal for context. We produce other methods of quantifying participant efficiency for critical inquiry, and people requirements change over time. One imagines making an attempt to explain a 6-WAR participant to Ted Williams, who grunts and says, “I fought in two, and that’s more than enough.”

But it’s good to know whether or not the present dearth of .300 hitters is merely an artifact of our present (uncommon and quickly evolving) offensive context. So as a substitute of monitoring .300/.400/.500 hitters, I went to the FanGraphs + Stat leaderboards for common, OBP, and slugging proportion, and located what number of gamers per yr posted a 115 in these classes.

Why 115? Well, if you wish to contemplate .260 a traditional historic baseline for league batting common, .300 is 15% higher. It’s additionally not too removed from one normal deviation above common. Most of all, I wanted to set a cutoff someplace, and 115 is interesting from the angle of all of us discovered to depend by fives as a result of that’s what number of fingers most individuals have on every hand. No must overthink issues:

For many of the growth period, between 10% and 20% of certified hitters hit .300 or OBP’d .400, and people two stats tracked one another over time. There are some apparent outliers — once more, you may see shortened seasons in 1981 and 2020, the juiced ball, and the cut-off date the place MLB cracked down on steroids.

But although offense is up usually this yr, the variety of outliers within the triple slash classes is down. Way down, actually.

I don’t know why that is. Well, I’ve a fairly strong principle as to why there’d be fewer outlier hitters in 2023 than in 1999 or at any time when: The high quality of play improves yearly. The extra scientific groups and gamers are about techniques and coaching, the upper the ground is for a giant league hitter. And even when the ceiling is greater in relative phrases, there’d be much less room between competence and excellence. I feel again to a time when Honus Wagner was working circles round everybody else as a result of he was the one participant within the league who’d found a miraculous breakthrough known as “going to the gym.” Once everybody began figuring out, the Honus Wagners of the world had been rather less particular. Repeat that course of sufficient occasions, and also you’ll get fashionable baseball.

As persuasive as I feel that concept is, I’ve no actual rationalization for why that might’ve occurred , since final season. Perhaps all of the scientific and coaching breakthroughs of the late 2010s have been taking root all alongside, however that is simply the primary regular main league season in the most effective a part of a decade. Between the sign-stealing scandals, the pandemic, the juiced balls, and the lockout, baseball has had a fairly bizarre time of it the previous few years. Maybe we’re simply now getting again to frequently scheduled programming.

Or perhaps it’s one thing else, however that’s a query for an additional article, maybe just a few years down the highway. Either method, the vital factor to recollect is that this: The .300 hitter remains to be dying.