Whoever first said, "Got what you wanted, lost what you had" was a genius. It's a far better way of saying, "Be careful what you wish for." Wishing implies payback received passively for an errant thought. We know the world doesn't work that way; we campaign actively for our own fates. In this life, you take exactly as much abuse as you allow yourself to take. Baseball builders know this: Figures as diverse as Branch Rickey and Casey Stengel each said in their own way that you make your own luck. Stengel said some people have bad luck all their lives.
The downturn in baseball offense is a case in point of people agitating for something to happen, then being unhappy when they get their way. The steroids scolds, the PEDs paranoids, spent years haranguing baseball fans and telling them that what they had watched and cheered for over more than a decade wasn't real. They did this despite their Marvel Comics understanding of baseball and medicine and a belated sense of ethics that turned on like a light bulb long after Androstenedione was seen in Mark McGwire's locker, after they had written the greatest-season-ever books after 1998.
Apologies to Marvel Comics; at least Stan Lee admitted he was writing fiction. A few questions that came up again and again this month were, "What does Nelson Cruz making the All-Star team as a starter say about the Biogenesis scandal? What does it say about fans' interest in the purity of the game? What kind of comment is it on Major League Baseball's zealous crusade to rid the game of cheaters?"
A: It says many things, among them that baseball's version of McCarthyism caused more indignation in the media than it ever did in fans, but what it says most clearly is something that has been clear since the rise of Babe Ruth as a hitter changed the conversation from the 1919 World Series to home runs. Fans like offense. That's what professional writers such as Buster Olney and Tom Verducci are saying as well: We dwell in a low-offense valley, and they miss the offense.
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Olney suggested "perhaps lowering the mound again, or changing the composition of the ball." Verducci wants to outlaw the shift. The terrible, painful irony here is that they fail to recognize that such remedies for the current lack of offense are no different from the use of drugs to get the same effect. What doesn't seem to have occurred to those asking for more offense is that they are requesting the manipulation of scoring levels by artificial means, which is exactly what Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez supposedly did.
What they are suggesting is actually worse, because the efficacy of PEDs was never untangled from all the other phenomena at work during that period, particularly stadium design, ball composition and a highly variable but generally shrinking strike zone, whereas if you (say) lowered the mound, or lowered it and moved it back from its traditional 60'6" from home plate, if you moved all the fences in to 250 feet, if you shrunk the foul territory in ballparks like Oakland's and told the Rockies to deactivate their humidor, we know what would happen. You'd fix offense, in the sense that the 1919 World Series was fixed.
Self-appointed purists have complained that baseball's sacred record-book was pillaged by drug users, but it was always subject to manipulations like these. Remember 1930, the average hitter in the National League averaged .303 and slugged .448. After that season, the NL deadened the ball by publicized choice, whereas the American League stayed with the rabbit ball for awhile longer. That's why from 1931 through 1938 the AL had 14 seasons of 40 or more home runs and the NL had none, why Lou Gehrig and Hank Greenberg had seasons of more than 180 RBI and the NL topped out with Joe Medwick's 154 (one of only two NL seasons of more than 138 RBI during that period), the NL had seven seasons with batting averages above .350 while the AL had 18, and so on.
We won't rehash all the other ways that baseball's record book is bogus except to mention the biggest one: Apartheid major league baseball was a minor league.
Some people are never happy. While they were busy wringing their hands over the record books being defiled with too many home runs, it never occurred to them that it could be defiled from the other direction, with too little offense and too much pitching. Not that we're even at that point yet. This is not 1968. It is, on a majors-wide basis, consistent with any number of seasons since 1968. It is the lowest of any season since 1992, but it's not out of the range of the normal.
There is another implication here. That this can be done, that the resiliency of balls can be altered, that fences can be pushed in or out, that the strike zone can wax and wane. If it can happen now, it could have happened before, such as in 1993-2009. Not 1996, after the strike. It started earlier. Not after the Mitchell Report. It happened later. Biogenesis did not change anything. When it comes to PEDs, we've always confused correlation and causation, and the correlation isn't even there. The hypocrisy of the whole thing isn't the how of it all, it's that certain flavors of baseball aren't the kind that some pundits like.
A Darwinian evolution that adjusts to the game's evolving environments has always been baseball's saving grace. If the shift is eating batting averages, pull hitters like David Ortiz will eventually be supplemented by more Ichiros and Rod Carews and Wade Boggses and all the others who could hit to all fields. Pitchers who throw 100 mph will miss fewer bats if batters aren't swinging for the fences. And that's OK -- they can hit singles and doubles and we'll see more .350 hitters, bunt singles, and a rise in stolen bases. No one was scouting Billy Hamilton types 10 years ago. Teams didn't want them. They'll want them now, and as those players arrive in greater numbers, the shift will be deemphasized and we'll see the David Ortiz types rise again.
It has all happened before, will all happen again, and there is nothing new under the sun except people trying to fix things that will take care of themselves via the age-old process of innovation and response that can best be observed in the evolution of military tactics. Hannibal rolled up the Romans with a pincer move at the Battle of Cannae, generals learned to watch their flanks, and so on. The French build the Maginot Line, the Germans invest in tanks to go around said line. Baseball shifts to the right, hitters will eventually shift to the left, and so on ad infinitum.
Craig Calcaterra pointed out a host of other reasons that outlawing the shift is a bizarre overreaction earlier on Wednesday, and I won't recapitulate them here except to note as he did that Verducci missed the biggest reason of all for declining offense: the inability of hitters to make contact. Strikeout rates are rising like global temperatures and have more or less continually despite the downturn in offense:
Major League strikeouts per nine innings |
|
YEAR |
K/9 |
1996 |
6.50 |
1997 |
6.66 |
1998 |
6.61 |
1999 |
6.48 |
2000 |
6.53 |
2001 |
6.74 |
2002 |
6.53 |
2003 |
6.40 |
2004 |
6.60 |
2005 |
6.38 |
2006 |
6.59 |
2007 |
6.67 |
2008 |
6.83 |
2009 |
6.99 |
2010 |
7.13 |
2011 |
7.13 |
2012 |
7.56 |
2013 |
7.57 |
2014 |
7.72 |
Instead of outlawing the shift, maybe we should just give batters a fourth strike. Assuming that's out of the question, the real solution here is not tinkering with the rules, but a generational change. Hitters like Paul Waner, who made hard contact and shot for the foul lines instead of the middle of the field, will return to us. I can't wait to see him and his fellows. So hands off, sportswriters. It will be a different kind of baseball than you're used to, but just as good -- and when it happens, you can still bitch about how all these triples mean that we need more home runs.