Couch: Baseball's Big Problem Is This Many Ks Is Not OK
Things develop slowly in a baseball season. Trends emerge over days, weeks. You can’t draw conclusions from any one moment. And each individual game is like a season in miniature, developing slowly. One pitch at a time. You hold your breath waiting for something to happen.
Baseball may be measured in patience, but I don’t have enough of it for this. Nobody does. I can only hold my breath so long. Baseball is just so boring, and it’s only getting worse.
Just look at this past weekend. You can see that baseball has now gone past its tipping point. The game is almost unwatchable.
On Sunday, Cleveland pitcher Shane Bieber struck out 13 batters to become the first pitcher with at least 10 strikeouts in each of his first four starts to a season. Strikeouts used to be thrilling. Now, they’re just more time that the ball isn’t in play.
It’s all home runs or strikeouts, and nothing in between except long, boring expanses of time and space. Nothing is happening, but the games are taking longer and longer, stretching well past three hours.
The New York Yankees were supposed to be the best team in the American League this year, and maybe they will end up being just that. But for now, they’re 5-10 with the worst record in the AL. On Saturday, they struck out 13 times against Tampa and went 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position. Meanwhile, Tampa had six hits, three of them homers. Their first five runs all came off homers.
In New York, the media are asking why the Yankees can’t keep up by hitting enough homers. Really? The problem is that analytics say you should just swing for the fences on everything, that it’s a waste of time to lay down a bunt, advance a runner or bunch hits together.
You know, all the stuff that makes baseball baseball.
And Chicago is the most ridiculous of all: The Cubs, who played Atlanta, are on pace to shatter all records as the worst hitting team in baseball history. Their team batting average is .184. Atlanta’s pitching staff is hitting .185.
The Cubs have struck out 151 times in 15 games.
On Saturday, the Cubs finally hit the ball and the narrative was that they had broken through and would be fine now. The bats would warm up.
They had hit six home runs.
But that’s actually the problem. When you just swing as hard as you can on every pitch, you’re usually going to miss. The Cubs just happened to have a day when the bat accidentally hit the ball. It’s not as if they learned how to do all the little things to manufacture runs.
Baseball knows this is a crisis and is about to experiment in the minor leagues -- the Atlantic League -- with moving the pitching mound back one foot, to 61 feet, 6 inches.
In The Athletic, Jayson Stark broke down some of the numbers:
The average fastball is going 93.4 mph, the highest ever. Teams strike out an average of 9.5 times per nine innings, the highest ever. If this keeps up, the strikeout rate will have increased 16 years in a row.
MLB feels that if the mound is moved back one foot, then batters will have slightly more time to see the ball and the average fastball will feel like 91.6 mph instead of 93.4. That was the average velocity in 2010, when there were 8,500 fewer strikeouts than in the most recent full season, 2019.
This should allow batters to hit the ball more often. However, they won’t be able to feed off the power from pitchers as much, meaning they won’t be able to hit the ball quite as hard.
But I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to help as much as baseball hopes. The analytics still say to swing for the fences. And 91.6 mph is plenty of velocity to turn around a home run. If batters have more time to see the pitch and have plenty of speed coming at them, aren’t they just going to have more time to square up a pitch and swing as hard as they can? They’ll just keep going for home runs all the time, won’t they?
I think baseball might have to deaden the ball a little bit. But the risk in that is that home run totals would go down. And people still like to see homers.
Without any scientific data to back this up, I’m surprised the analytics still say to swing for the fences. I mean, the Cubs and Yankees are doing that, and they just don’t hit the ball often enough.
Why aren’t batters trying to figure out how to adjust? Just make solid contact? Wouldn’t that help?
Something has to change. The Cubs scored three runs against Atlanta Sunday, two on Anthony Rizzo home runs. Meanwhile, Atlanta hit four home runs in the first inning.
It’s just so boring. The 1906 Chicago White Sox were known as the Hitless Wonders. Their batting average was 46 points higher than the Cubs’ current average.
Soon, people will stop bothering to hold their breath.