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Scoring in Baseball Returns to Dead-Ball Levels
But the figures are from exactly a century ago, and they are slightly better than those that major leaguers are putting up this year. As baseball finishes up a fifth consecutive season with declining offense, its numbers have shrunk to levels just below those of 1911, the middle of the dead-ball era. Through Thursday, major league teams were averaging 4.28 runs a game while batting .255 with a .321 on-base-percentage. Walks per game, even hit batters per game, are virtually identical a century apart. The end results — runs, batting average, on-base percentage — are strikingly similar, but the elements of offense have of course been radically reconfigured in a century of evolution. Compared with the teams of 1911, teams now hit more than four and a half times as many home runs and many more doubles — and they strike out three and a half times as often. Teams a <a href="http://www.newerahatstock.com/"><strong>wholeslae new era hats</strong></a> century ago hit three times as many triples as they do now, stole twice as many bases, hit sacrifice bunts almost five times as often and made almost three times as many errors. But over the decades, as the style of play, the ball, the ballparks and the ballplayers have changed, runs per game have kept moving like a sine curve, always returning to the middle. Major League Baseball was only 0.01 off the modern game’s median for runs per game just last year. “The game is being played differently, but what is remarkable is the relatively constant nature of runs scored,” said John Thorn, an author and the official historian for Major League Baseball. Still, baseball is in one of its worst offensive slides since the American League joined the National League as a major league in 1901. This run of five consecutive seasons with declining offense, as measured by runs per game, is only the second such stretch in modern history; the only other similar slump was from 1939 to 1943. (Ever-increasing offense is rare, too; only once has runs per game increased as many as five years in a row, from 1917 to 1922.) Changes will come, baseball historians and analysts say. “The game is built on balance,” Thorn said. “When one side, offense or defense, gets out of balance, someone takes an action to bring it back into balance.” Rob Neyer, a baseball analyst and the national baseball editor for SBNation.com, said there was an equilibrium about the game, whether internal or external. “There are natural pressures from fans, from the media, even the players themselves,” said Neyer, an occasional contributor to The New York Times. “Nobody wants to see two runs a game, and nobody wants to see seven or eight runs a game.” But the game changes slowly, Neyer said. “Major League Baseball as it exists now isn’t as aggressive as other sports in changing rules to reach desired statistical levels,” he added. As a result, he said, professional sports <a href="http://newerahatstock.com/nfl-hats-c-18.html"><strong>nfl hats</strong></a> like basketball and football have undergone radical changes in statistics that could be viewed as equivalent to batting average. Shooting percentage in the N.B.A., for example, is far superior to what it was 60 years ago, and pass-completion percentage in the N.F.L. has also improved drastically. Neyer said the last major change in baseball was the lowering of the pitcher’s mound in 1969, unless you count the introduction of performance-enhancing drugs. “So, two major changes in almost 50 years,” he said. Add in the designated hitter, and it is three. Changes in the past have affected offense, intentionally and unintentionally. Take the ball itself, which has been tinkered with several times. John McMurray, the chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research’s dead-ball era committee, pointed out that 1911 was an anomaly for its time — a season of relatively high scoring during two decades when teams generally averaged less than four runs a game — in part because of a change in the ball. McMurray said a cork-center baseball was introduced at the 1910 World Series, and its use was continued in 1911. Offense then soared, with the largest single-season increase in runs per game of the 20th century. But that surge was brief. Within three years, runs were back below four a game. McMurray attributed that to pitchers’ increased scuffing of the ball, which he said was popularized by a New York Highlanders pitcher, Russ Ford. He was soon out of baseball. So were runs. Ballparks have changed the game, too. A wave of stadium building occurred in the middle of the dead-ball era, much like the one that coincided with the recent era of big offense. As the size of stadiums has changed, so has the style of play in them. Ballparks used to be huge — in 1911, the average dimensions in the major leagues were 362 feet down the left-field line, 467 to center and 337 to right. (Current stadiums average 332-405-329.) One ballpark, the Palace of the Fans in Cincinnati, was 390-510-450, which makes Citi Field look cozy. With a deader ball and huge stadiums, triples, stolen bases and sacrifice bunts were major factors, not home runs. The 1907, 1908 and 1909 seasons — three of the four worst for scoring — put the dead ball in the dead-ball era. It is no wonder the livelier cork-center ball was introduced. Theories abound for the recent offensive nosedive. Thorn and Neyer cited testing for steroids, initiated for the 2004 season. Thorn suggested that changes in the drafting of pitchers had had an effect. An element of randomness — what Thorn called “the elephant in the room” — may also be an issue. Talent, for example, is not distributed equally over time. David Fleitz, a baseball historian and author, noted that around 1911, an unusually large number of very good pitchers, including several who would go into the Hall of Fame, retired. “One era of pitching may have come to an end and another had not yet begun,” he said. “They couldn’t be replaced all at once.” Likewise, McMurray said, “We may be in a cycle where we have good young pitchers” in the major leagues now. And if baseball cycles repeat, perhaps there is predictive value in the narrative, if not the numbers, of 1911. That year, teams from Philadelphia (the Athletics) and New York (the Giants) met in the World Series. A team with a high-powered offense (it had the so-called 100,000 Infield; some things certainly have changed) met a team with a star-studded rotation. And Home Run Baker earned his nickname with two <a href="http://newerahatstock.com/rock-star-hat-c-16.html"><strong>rock star hat</strong></a> blasts that made history, and made Philadelphia the World Series champion.
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