Don't believe me? Here's some facts / stats: Major League Baseball teams, thus far this season, are averaging just 0.9 home runs per game and just 4.02 runs per game overall. Those numbers, should they continue, would be the second lowest home run average and the lowest runs per game average over the last 30 seasons. Throw in the fact that the league is batting a miserable .231, which is the lowest average of all-time, and that raises a plethora of questions.
It appears that hitters in 2022 have it even harder than hitters in 1968, who batted just .237 in baseball's final season with a 15-inch mound. They're likewise worse than they were at the outset of the '21 campaign, when hitters were batting just .236 through the season's first two months.
The obvious boogeyman this time last year was the sticky stuff that pitchers were using to get unnatural spin on their pitches. The league acted accordingly when it stepped up enforcement on banned substances in June, and it worked as hitters jacked up their average to .248 in the season's final four months.
As spin rates remain depressed in 2022, the sticky stuff ban still seems to be working. This naturally got me to poking around for other explanations for this season's early offensive outage, as well as for potential ways that the problem might be solved.
Because it's still early in the season, the possible relation between the underperformance of these batted balls and the weather can't be ignored. Balls don't fly as far when it's cold, and April 'tis the season for that kind of weather at the ol' ball game.
More so than at the weather, though, some are pointing accusatory fingers at the baseball itself. Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, for example, told reporters: "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but something is different."
One possibility, as reported by Eno Sarris of The Athletic, is that there are now humidors at all 30 of the league's stadiums. The idea is ostensibly to make the behavior of balls more consistent, but humidors have also been known to reduce the bounciness of the ball in drier climates. Since the league isn't yet into the warmer, more humid weather of the summer months, it makes sense that the offense-suppressing effect of humidors would be the norm to this point.
Moving on to more straightforward matters, the effect of the past winter's 99-day lockout on the league's early offensive output also demands discussion. Starting pitchers are only averaging 4.7 innings which means hitters are facing fresher arms less than halfway through a nine-inning game.
As if having to look at so many different pitchers wasn't hard enough, it's also not so easy anymore for a hitter to go to the plate and sit on a fastball. This isn't so much because velocity is holding its upward trend, though that's certainly a challenge in its own right. It's more so because only 55.4 percent of all pitches are fastballs, which is on track to beat 2020 for the lowest fastball rate of the pitch tracking era.
Elsewhere on the topic of things that are more common than they used to be, defensive shifts have also proliferated about as much as it seems.
When the Statcast era began, about three-quarters of all pitches were thrown in front of standard infield alignments. Now in 2022, it's all the way down to 54.1 percent. Teams obviously wouldn't be moving away from standard infield defenses if the shifts weren't working.
I don't want to see the pendulum swing too far the other way but it is my opinion that the enjoyability of baseball's product will be lacking for as long as the deck remains so thoroughly stacked against hitters. And it's all the more alarming knowing that there is no easy fix like there was last year. Whereas MLB could and ultimately did snap its fingers on sticky stuff, the changes that would help right now simply can't happen overnight.
Fortunately, MLB is at least on the right track with the experimental rule changes it's carrying out in the minor leagues. These include a pitch clock, which might slow down fastballs if it comes to the major league level. They also include regulations on defensive shifts, which we think are a no-brainer. There's also larger bases, which could lead to more infield hits and stolen base attempts.
There might even be a way to reinvigorate the role of the starting pitcher. The league would merely need to take a cue from Nate Silver of Five-Thirty-Eight, who forwarded the idea of limiting teams to 10 pitchers plus one emergency hurler. That way, they'd only have so many arms to turn to on a given night.
In the meantime, baseball's offensive environment sort of is what it is. All anyone can do is hope that the bats will heat up with the weather as the season moves along.
