The Spring of Baseball's Hope and Its Diminishing Returns
How an increased focus on batter vs. pitcher in the game has reduced variance and made baseball just a little less unpredictable
In two weeks, the most sacred of rituals in America’s pastime begins. Pitchers and catchers will report to their camps in either Florida or Arizona, marking the beginning of preparations for the months-spanning spectacle known as the Major League Baseball season. Spring training is the one time of the year where every team has a chance, or at least it was until the Astros began their tank. I could write pages upon pages on why a baseball tank is incredibly stupid compared to one in any of the other major sports leagues, but I’m not in the mood to do that right now. Anyway, variance in Major League Baseball over a 162-game season can lead to some interesting results. A playoff team can be separated from a team with a failed season by a margin of ten games or fewer. Compared even to the NBA, where teams finish with 60 wins regularly in a regular season half as long as MLB’s, the sheer number of games can be an equalizer. I mean, in the last ten full 82-game NBA seasons, 17 teams finished with 60 wins or greater, which would be equivalent to 118 wins in a MLB season. No team has ever won 118 games. Only two in the history of the league won 116, and only six teams total have won 110 games or greater. So, when someone says everyone has a chance in the MLB season during spring training, they’re more correct than not.
Philadelphia fan doomerism will look at the rosters of the Washington Nationals, New York Mets, Miami Marlins, and especially the baseball team in Atlanta, and see that the Phillies may be in for a last-place finish in the division. I’m not entirely saying that is not going to be the case, because outside of that magical run between 2007 and 2011 and the 1993 season, Phillies fans have been trained to expect the worst. Ownership also set itself up to be notoriously cheap, after John Middleton had the gall to stand up in front of the press and say his team lost $2 billion. You don’t need to see the books to figure out he is probably lying. Still, for as much doom and gloom that Phillies fans expected, the offseason turned out to be decidedly not bad. The team picked up some fresh bullpen arms to add to a unit that inarguably cost the team a spot in the expanded playoffs last year. Both Didi Gregorius and JT Realmuto re-signed with the team after both were thought to be goners after Middleton cried poor. Most notably, the team fired general manager Matt Klentak, “promoted” Andy MacPhail to a position where he wouldn’t be making baseball decisions, and hired Sam Fuld and Dave Dombrowski to the GM and team president positions respectively. Dombrowski’s reputation as a spend, spend, SPEND team builder bodes well for a team that is in a big market and receives a lot of money.
The lineup featuring Bryce Harper, Realmuto, Gregorius, Rhys Hoskins, Andrew McCutchen, Alec Bohm, and Scott Kingery should produce a lot of offense. The rotation, topped by Aaron Nola and Zach Wheeler and rounded out with a bunch of fliers taken out, should be enough to keep the team in most games. The bullpen is the question mark, but it can’t be any worse than it was last year. It might be hard to see the Phillies muscling into third place in contention for the second wild card, but it’s not impossible. Certainly, though a longshot, it’s not entirely out of the question that the Mets continue to be cursed, the Nationals underachieve, and that Atlanta might have a severely down year and the Phillies sneak into the division title. I would never predict it, because things rarely ever turn out that fortunate for a team in this city, but luck could bless them to a division title. They’re not tanking, so they have hope. It’s not a hard concept to understand.
The truth that few people want to admit, especially when they’re partisans for teams that win titles, is that in order to succeed in any sport, you need both skill and luck. Every team that wins a title, from the dominant 1927 Yankees to the 2006 Cardinals, who won their division at 83-76 and rode a hot streak all the way to through the World Series, needs some kind of luck to bless them. Luck can be statistically quantified through BABIP, or batting average on balls in play. Baseball analysts quantify a plate appearance as having “three true outcomes,” or results that are the purest outcomes of a pitcher vs. a batter with no other players on the field having any impact on it whatsoever. They are the automatic home run (one hit over the outfield fence), the strikeout, and the base on balls. Any other result where the ball is batted into the field of play relies on luck more than skill. It relies on where the ball is hit in proximity to where the fielder is located or the quality of the turf or the ability of said fielder to get the ball where it needs to go. A batted ball that doesn’t go over the fence is where every equation is rent asunder and the driving factor of whether the play is successful for the offense or the defense is entropy.
BABIP then is less a statistic that quantifies skill and more one that describes the average chaos in a given play where none of the true three outcomes is a result. Higher BABIP for the offense means they had better fortune in putting a ball in the gap, which is harder than old baseball guys say it is, or they hit a divot in the field that made a ground ball find the space between the shortstop and third baseman more often. Lower BABIP for a pitcher means their support behind them in the field was in the right place at the right time more often than not. This stat says absolutely nothing about skill; it only describes how turbulent the results are, like watching how individual raindrops randomly choose their paths on a windshield. It makes sense then that, at least until recently, you could get a lot of variance in the final standings. You could get a team like the 1993 Phillies or the 1999 Padres that comes out of nowhere to punch their way through teams that were better constructed or had better margins on the three true outcomes.
I have to wonder though if the seeming increase in the three true outcomes in plate appearances over the last few years is baseball shaving off luck and honing the game down to a point where skill overtakes luck. While no player has come close to the home run explosion-era totals of single season home runs since 2001, when Barry Bonds broke Mark McGwire’s four-year-old single season record and Sammy Sosa had the last of his three 60-plus home run seasons, more and more players on the roster are hitting 20 and 30 homers with greater frequency. Home run totals for each team have seemingly gone up in the last few years, and the explosion of strikeouts has been even more poignant. It feels like the game is centered on those three true outcomes, and the need for luck is evaporating before everyone’s very eyes. I’m not sure why the rate of getting the three true outcomes is increasing. Perhaps coaching is becoming so refined that the people teaching the players can hone in on the techniques one needs either to blow a pitch by an eager batter or to hit that incoming pitch in such a way that it goes over the fence. As the graphs converge on to asymptotes where luck dissipates, the margin of error for teams that may not be as completely built as the best fades.
Perhaps the game is headed for an area where the haves and have-nots are more fully delineated. Baseball is already declining in popularity because the writers turned against the home run hitting studs of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s because Bonds was mean to them. (NOTE: there was a legit reason to negatively cover Bonds, and that was and still is his unanswered domestic violence accusation. No one really cares to mention that, however.) Rather than admitting their grudge against him was petty, they put up a veneer of a moral crusade against alleged PED users, dragging anyone who could hit a home run or hit 98 mph or greater on a radar gun into a mire where their abilities were questioned. Obviously, PED use was, and probably still is, rampant, but the secret was everyone was probably on them, so no one really had the advantage. Now, scared of history repeating itself, MLB has just stopped marketing its marquee players. I bet the only people who could pick Mike Trout out of a lineup are Angels fans who watch him everyday and Eagles fans who recognize him the dude who hangs out in awesome seats at the Linc to watch his favorite football team play on Sundays after his season is over. He’s only perhaps the most talented player ever to put on a uniform. Doesn’t that seem like a massive failure to you?
The last thing the game for a league that either cannot or will not market its biggest stars needs is for each at-bat to become a series of applying equations and nothing more. I don’t mind it because I find home runs thrilling and strikeouts gripping. But I am also a guy who likes wrestling for the actual matches and who from time to time will stop watching the ball in a football game and start watching the action at the line of scrimmage. I admit most people are not like me, and when those people leave the game because the outcomes aren’t as chaotic, baseball might as well become obsolete. If only four teams are viable, what does that say for the other 26 teams that need to fill stadia with at least 30,000 people 81 times a year and court even more to watch on television?
Then again, I am not entirely sure luck will ever dissipate from the process. Not every plate appearance can end in the three true outcomes, and even if they do, luck affects things like wind currents or grip on the ball or even the decisions by the batter to swing or not swing at certain pitches. If the people in charge are smart, maybe there will be a course correction in the same way that there was when pitchers dominated the league in the late ‘60s. I don’t know. However, hope springing eternal for fans of all 30 teams has to be a constant going forward. If not? Well, baseball might go the way of Vaudeville or pogo sticks. That would be a damn shame.