Jarred Kelenic’s MLB debut and the debate over strikeouts and offense

Watching Jarred Kelenic’s MLB debut last night, the opposing pitcher took a no-hitter into the eighth inning. We’ve had five no-hitters already in this young season, along with seven games with just one hit and 29 where a team managed just two hits. It feels like pitchers are dominating. MLB is experimenting with rules in the minor leagues which include efforts to increase offense, including larger base sizes, limiting the number of pickoff throws allowed and even moving back the mound.

But this is a lot of hand-wringing over nothing.

In a way, yes, pitchers are dominating. But batters have found a way to counter and the end result is a game that has run scoring essentially at league average with historical norms. This is the 75th season since Jackie Robinson made his MLB debut and, in that span, the average MLB team has scored 4.4 runs per game. Through games of Wednesday, MLB teams have averaged 4.33 runs per game. And historical trends have teams scoring more runs in the summer months than in April, so it’s likely that average rpg will be higher than that when the season ends.

Since Chris F. will ask, the standard deviation is 0.33 – which means that 2021 is easily within one standard deviation. What we’re seeing is a very typical year in runs per game. We’re not seeing anything like the high-offense years of the Silly Ball era nor are we seeing anything that rivals what happened in the deadball-esque 1960s.

In 1950, MLB averaged 4.85 rpg. In the next 10 years, scoring went down from the previous season seven times. Expansion in the AL in 1961 and NL in 1962 temporarily halted the downward trend. But in 1963, rpg fell to 3.95 and by 1968, famously known as The Year of the Pitcher, MLB had a 3.42 rpg. That prompted the lowering of the mound for 1969 and when the AL lagged in scoring, rpg was 3.47 in the AL in 1972, it introduced the designated hitter in 1973.

Historically speaking, it’s taken a sub-3.50 rpg to invite tinkering from MLB to address offense. With the lowest month for runs behind us and warm summer months ahead, 2021 is nowhere close to this threshold.

So, why does the argument about run scoring persist?

This isn’t about runs. Instead, this is all about a preference for how the game is played. There’s nothing wrong with having a preference. Most people are drawn to whatever style was prevalent when they first started watching the game. For some, that means the one-run strategies from the 1960s. For others, it’s the “hit the ball in the gap and run” games from the 1970s. And still others want to see the high-scoring games from the late 20-early 21st Century. While there’s nothing wrong with having a preference, the issue becomes when you insist that the game has to be played that way.

Right now, many people are up in arms about all of the strikeouts in the game. It brings to mind Crash Davis’ speech to Nuke LaLoosh in “Bull Durham” – “Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.”

While part of me applauds Crash’s anti-fascist take on things, my focus on that quote is the “boring” part. Why is a strikeout considered boring while a 4-3 is not? The overwhelming majority of ground ball outs are boring and we should really stop pretending otherwise. My opinion is that a pitcher striking out Bryce Harper is much more exciting than watching Harper ground out to second base.

We’re right in the middle of Patrick Mazeika mania, the Quad-A lifer who’s had a moment in the sun where two ground balls he hit drove in key runs for the Mets. Those absolutely were exciting and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. But the reason it was exciting is because it’s so incredibly rare. If a grounder with an exit velocity of 60 brought in a run every week, no one would give it a second glance.

Rooting for weak ground balls as some kind of desirable outcome makes zero sense to me. But then again, I watched the Mets in the 1970s and they specialized in that kind of thing. Maybe I’ve just reached my quota of that type of outcome.

My opinion is that the game would be improved if batters did better attacking the shift. Every lefty hitter should have the “slug bunt” in his repertoire. But to me, the answer there is for hitters to do it, or managers to order their hitters to do so. It’s not to outlaw the shift. No one wants to give Dave Kingman credit for anything but when the third baseman played on the outfield grass, he was not opposed to laying down a bunt. We’ve seen Harper bunt against the shift, too. It can be done.

It seems to me that there are two big problems that we have here. The first is that the league is once again doing a lousy job of marketing the game, spending too much time telling the world what’s “wrong” with the game, rather than celebrating what’s right. Can you name all five pitchers who’ve thrown a no-hitter this season? Do you know the two hitters with a higher average than Mike Trout? How about the five hitters who have double-digit homers? Maybe instead of telling people that there are too many strikeouts they can talk about player accomplishments, instead.

And the second problem is that the Commissioner is more interested in creating a legacy than merely overseeing the game. It seems to me that he gets excited about potentially being known as the guy who brought offense back to baseball rather than asking if all he’s doing is creating permanent solutions to temporary problems.

But, what do I know – I’m just some idiot in North Carolina who stayed up past midnight to watch a Seattle Mariners game. For what it’s worth, Kelenic took the collar but he did hit two balls hard. One was right at the first baseman and the other went to the warning track in the gap. He also struck out yet people kept watching.