The Game is the Same as It Ever Was...Except Better

Baseball facts supported by data....

There was no Major League Baseball yesterday. It was the day after the All Star Game and the only day during the six month regular season where there is no product on the field. But there is always baseball data. They’ll play 2340 games this year. (20k innings and 60k at bats). And they will generate a mountain of it. Fantastic sites like baseball-reference.com will organize it and allow exportable access to it for free. So yesterday in the time I normally would have spent watching the Padres with my family, I dug around some baseball data to answer a good question.

If the game just isn’t the same today, which has been true for every era of baseball, what about it isn’t the same? And what is? And what interesting things can we infer about the game from those data points.

I used aggregate average game output data from 1950 onward to see the patterns. The data exists before 1950 but it starts to get noisy because of things like segregation and wars and “dead” baseballs. Waiting until 1950 normalizes for much of that. So I used the last full season of major league baseball, 2021, and compared it with the average of all the average game outputs of the previous 70 seasons. I figured a reasonable standard for “mostly the same” was less than 5% deviation from the previous 70 years average.

What’s mostly the same?

For all the things that’s changed about the world over the last 70 years, if you put nine of the best baseball players in the world on a field to play another nine, how many runs they would score isn’t one of them. It’s going to be 4.3 runs per game. In 2021, that’s what the number was, which was within 3% points of the 70 year average. For frame of reference, the NFL has been on a consistent march upward in scoring since the modern league formed in the 1960s, peaking in 2020, which was north of 25% higher than during the 1966 merger. Baseball has had its outlier years and eras, but it tends to correct over time. Which is pretty remarkable.

What’s also not different is how successful pitchers and batters are at their primary tasks of either getting on base or getting batters out. On base percentage and total bases are the same. Pitchers walk about the same amount as they always have. And, as stated, runs are the same. So the pace of baseball production output is pretty rigid. If I went to a game in 1950, each team would send about 38 people to the plate and about 32% of them would reach base and about four of them would score. And if I saw a game today, that would also be the case.

What’s really remarkably un-different is the age of players. For 70 years the average age of a major league player stepping into the batter’s box or onto the mound was 28 years old. In 2021 the average for both was also 28. Batters were exactly at the average. Pitchers were six months older than the average. Major league baseball has expanded who, where and through what pipelines they can get players. And they’ve progressed from chain smokers that never saw the inside of a weight room to Bryce Harper who could be the next Thor. But we don’t get ballplayers playing older or younger than they used to.

There’s a strong case that no matter what we’ve done to the human body over the last 70 years, we’re not really moving the needle on who is ready to play major league baseball and when it’s time for them to stop. Which tracks with what we know about the speed of technological progress and learning relative to the speed of physical evolution. Tom Cruise may be able to pretend to fly a jet the way he did 40 years ago. But I’d bet a set of steak knives he’s got nothing left on his fastball.

What’s different?

The most drastic change might not be what you think. Home Runs? Strike Outs? Nope. It’s that pitchers hit way more batters now than they used to. Like…approaching twice as many than they used to. Austin Adams, a 6’3” 220 lb Padres reliever with a 95 mph fastball hit 17 batters in what amounts to about 5 games worth of innings. Adams is an on outlier but the trend is broad. So when you see guys step into the batter’s box wearing what looks like a full set of body armor, old guys please resist the urge to scoff at their “softness” and realize they’re getting balls thrown into their 100 million dollar body parts way more than they used to by pitchers that can throw harder than they ever have. Which takes us to what else is different.

Pitchers throw really hard. Hunter Green threw 38 pitches over 100 mph in an April start this year. As crazy as that sounds, that’s actually not what’s really remarkably different though. There’s always been outliers that throw absurdly hard. What’s really different is that no one doesn’t throw hard. There’s 122 pitchers who averaged over 95 mph on their fastball this year. But what’s really crazy is that of the 466 pitchers who have thrown over 250 pitches so far this season, only 30 of them have straight fastballs under 90 mph. As recently as five years ago there were 60. The number of soft tossers in the game is rapidly approaching zero. Which takes us to the next most different things.

Batters strike out way more than they used to. Which makes sense because there are more hard throwing strike out pitchers. But they also strike out because just like no one throws soft any more, no one swings soft any more either. There are way more home runs. Somewhat more doubles. And way fewer singles and triples. Many fewer balls actually land in the field of play. About a third fewer. No one steals bases any more. And one other thing that was the most surprising. Fielders make less errors. While part of that can be explained by fewer balls being put into the field of play, not all of it can be. The overarching conclusion to all of this is that the baseball players on the field are amazingly more athletic and physically talented and SKILLED AT BASEBALL than they’ve ever been before. And it’s fun as hell to watch them do things on a baseball field the way NBA or NFL athletes can do things in their domains.

6’3” 220 lb “shortstop” Fernando Tatis Jr.

6’6” 245 lb Right Fielder Giancarlo Stanton hitting a 450 foot home run.

Another thing that’s really, really different, and this is almost certainly related to the last point, is that way more players actually play in a major league baseball game in any given season these days. Roster moves, roster expansion, pitching changes and pinch hitters are way more common. The only statistic that has risen in one direction for 70 years is the amount of hitters and pitchers that hit or pitched in the major leagues in any given year. And while some of that is explained by the expansion of teams, that only explains about a third of it for hitters and only a fifth of it for pitchers. The rest is just the dynamism player personnel and line up decision which is a factor of the growth of the amount of people who are playing baseball around the world and how many can reach the highest skill level. There’s a parade of flame throwing arms and “utility outfielders” that can hit the ball 475 feet wandering up and down the farm systems. About a third of all players today were born outside of the United States. And that is very different. And awesome.

One more thing.

If someone dropped out of the sky and in front of a computer and looked at the data, they would have found two anomalies for which they would need to assign an external cause. The first is when the mound was lowered in 1969. The second was when baseball increased steroid related suspensions. Both moved decade plus trends into another direction within the course of 2-3 years in ways you don’t see in any other data.

One more other thing.

Baseball games take a lot longer to play then they used to. In 1950 games took about 2 hours and 20 minutes. Today they take about 3 hours and 10 minutes. Certainly some of the 50 more minutes are related to television and advertising relative to 1950 pre-television standards. But mostly the games are longer for one obvious reason. There are more pitches. Strike outs take more pitches than two pitch pop outs and modern strike outs take even more pitches because batters don’t chase bad pitches. Walks take more pitches than they used to also. Batters just don’t swing the bat at pitches they can’t drive any more unless they have to. So they take more pitches; balls and strikes. And that makes for more pitches. And more pitches equals more time. There are lots of rules one could put in play to try and speed up the game. But the main culprit is batters take more pitches. And they take more of them because they’re harder to hit. And I don’t know how to change that.

One more other thing that’s changed….

Ebbets Field, Brooklyn 1950

Veterans Stadium, Philadelphia, 1980

Petco Park, San Diego, 2021

It’s never been better to watch a game at a ballpark. It’s also never been more expensive. But I guess you get what you pay for. Long games. Monster home runs. Pyrotechnics loud music and craft beers. Flame throwing fastballs and physics bending breaking balls. And guys that look like NBA power forwards tracking down balls in the outfield; the best athletes that have ever played the game. I know I’m supposed to want a guy to hit a two hopper to second base or pop out to the catcher instead of strike out because he’s trying to hit the ball in the ocean. And I know I’m supposed to want pitchers to start and complete a game instead of hitting the top of the zone at a hundo. But if it means less kinetic energy in the game, then I’m not sure how that’s better.

The game just isn’t what it used to be. It’s better. And it’s not close.