Strikeouts are killing baseball

I like that they focused on Brad Miller. Stupidly, I thought part of the reason he struggled to hit for power in Seattle (or chose not to) was because of spacious Safeco Field. Maybe he just hadn't heard of the new home-runs-or-bust strategy.

And ironically, the Mariners have become a home-runs-or-bust team, especially with some of their faster baserunners bogged down by injuries.

 

Wall Street Journal calculates the average time between balls in play.

Three minutes 48 seconds.

 

For the season?

 

Yeah. It's behind a paywall so I can't see the full method or breakdown, and especially whether HRs are balls in play. Maybe someone with a subscription can clip that part here.

 

I just didn't know if they meant the season or a particular postseason game this week.

Now I wonder what the average time is between the ball being in play in an NFL game.

 

Number seems kind of misleading once you read the explainer--doesn't include HRs and includes between-innings breaks. (Also should subscribe the Journal! Great paper, although expensive.)

From the accompanying chart: "All data from 2017 regular season, through Oct. 2. ... Figures on time between balls in play include between-innings breaks. Home runs not counted as balls in play."

The average in 1987 was 3 minutes and 6 seconds.

 

Stark tackled this for The Athletic. This is a great article. This is baseball in 2018. More strikeouts than hits. The fewest hits per game since 1972. A pace that is leading this sport toward 10,000 fewer balls in play this year than in 2009.

Stark: Five ideas that could help put the action back in...

The No. 1 recommendation is to limit the shift, because guys are changing their swings to uppercuts to hit over it. He says the front-office analytics people are dead-set against that idea.

 

The one thing Stark didn't address that I would like to see taken care of is the pine tar issue. Guys are doctoring the balls, clear as day, and the spin rates and strikeouts are the result. Seems like the easy first step would be enforcing that century-old rule before introducing all the radical changes.

tl;dr Fuck the Astros.

 

It’s awful to watch but what can really be done?

 

The shifts and limiting pitching changes were the two most promising possibilities of what Stark mentioned.

They have to do something though. This isn’t cyclical. Guys are only going to get bigger and stronger and throw harder from this point.

 

I hATE the idea of stopping shifts.

Ohtani hits to the open area in shifts. Just saying.