Missing Bats, mailbag edition: Coming to terms with MLB's strikeout era (2024)

By Andy McCullough, Zack Meisel, Stephen Nesbitt and Cody Stavenhagen

In the winter months following the 2021 MLB season, Marc Carig circulated a proposal to staffers at The Athletic. A longtime writer who had recently transitioned into editing, Carig had just watched the conclusion of a Major League Baseball season that furthered a notable trend. The sport’s collective batting average had fallen to .244, the lowest percentage since 1968, the famed “Year of The Pitcher,” which prompted baseball to lower its mound and shrink its strike zone. It hadn’t been this hard for batters to collect a hit in decades.

The explanation for the decline was clear. The sport-wide strikeout rate in 2021 finished at 23.2 percent, the highest in recorded history, a number that had risen in every full season dating back to 2007. This was not a coincidence. During those years, teams became better and better equipped at solving a problem that had plagued pitchers since baseball’s invention: How do you prevent runs? You prevent them, in the simplest and most effective terms, by making the hitters swing and miss.

The ripples from that basic but essential concept had profound effects on the sport. In the eyes of some, Major League Baseball had suffered because of it. It was undeniable to any keen observer, though, that missing bats had changed the landscape of baseball.

“We’ll trace the idea from its internet roots into baseball’s front offices and onto the field, showing how it has sprouted an entire technological complex that churns out the arms needed to feed this machine,” Carig, now The Athletic’s MLB senior managing editor, wrote in an early proposal for this project. “Pitching labs, sticky stuff, pitch tunneling, electronic sign stealing, the pursuit of velocity — all of it stems from the desperate desire to seize the upper hand by missing bats.”

Well. It took a little while. But that is the genesis of how last week’s five-part series, Missing Bats, came to be. We attempted to show the origin of the concept, the sport-wide implementation of its principles and the cost of its ubiquitousness. We also tried to find a path forward — as anyone who has read Jayson Stark can tell you, it won’t be easy.

Before we close the chapter on this series, we wanted to answer a few questions from readers. Much of the feedback we received dealt with this from the hitter’s perspective, which we’ll try to address here. But there are a few other loose ends worth tying up. Thanks for reading.

What part of the “missing bats” phenomenon do you think the fans enjoy? — Dale H.

There used to be some novelty to elite velocity. Fans used to check the scoreboard radar gun after every pitch thrown by someone like Aroldis Chapman. In this era, that sort of velocity is no longer rare. This season there are 20 starters whose fastball velocity sits at 95 mph or faster — and 81 (!) relievers doing the same. The limits of the human arm mean that you probably won’t see pitchers surpassing 106 mph. So we’re stuck in this odd band where 100 mph is no longer unique but it’s also close to the peak of performance.

So that’s one aesthetic aspect of this era that has lost some luster.

As for the rest: Fewer hits, more strikeouts, shorter outings for starters, more relievers — all of that, I think, creates a less appealing product for fans, especially casual fans. It’s hard to market pitching matchups when both starters are going to max out at 90 pitches and six innings. It’s hard to market an elite bullpen — think Cincinnati’s “Nasty Boys,” — when the group shuffles through fresh arms every couple of weeks. It’s hard to market the hitters when even the best of them are striking out more often than expected.

In general, my theory on fan enjoyment is pretty simple. Fans like it when their team wins and they dislike it when their team loses. They usually don’t much care how the victories come about. I covered the Kansas City Royals when they slapped singles and stole bases en route to the World Series in 2014 and 2015. Kauffman Stadium was a madhouse for those teams — but I don’t think the atmosphere would have been less raucous if they were drawing walks and slugging homers. So if you’re a fan of the Rays or the Guardians or the Astros — one of these teams that rode this wave into success in the 2010s, you probably are happy about this whole trend. If you root for one of the franchises that got left behind, you probably like it less. — McCullough

Why not shrink the strike zone to change the incentives? — Ian G.

Casual fans across the globe have been shouting until they’re hoarse: Baseball games need more walks!

No, really, there’s more to this inquiry than meets the eye. (Pun intended.)

When 4-2 games used to require 3 hours and 37 minutes to complete, Blue Jays CEO Mark Shapiro, once a member of MLB’s competition committee, would say that pace of play wasn’t the plague; the infrequency of action was what ailed the sport.

So the first thought when considering this question would be that, yes, a smaller strike zone would result in more walks, which is more minutes off the clock without anything particularly interesting unfolding on the diamond.

But there’s more of a cat-and-mouse game to this. Ian proceeded to say a smaller strike zone would create an incentive to be patient and not chase, which in turn could result in pitchers sacrificing some heat for better command. Maybe that’s true. It would certainly make pitchers and coaches re-evaluate pitch usage and sequencing strategies.

There’s a natural inclination to think about swing-and-miss stuff as a 99 mph heater zipping past a hitter’s bat. And while velocity is the face of missing bats culture, let’s not forget how much nastier every slider and splitter and changeup is compared to, say, a quarter-century ago.

But as Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla noted, the job of a pitcher “is to create an attack plan that convinces the hitters they have to swing.” That’s half the equation of “swing-and-miss” stuff. And with a smaller strike zone, that task would be more difficult. So maybe we would see more fastballs, which hitters would be more poised to whack.

“If you’re a guy who throws a sweeper that moves 20 inches horizontally, that’s a swing-and-miss pitch,” said Royals pitching coach Brian Sweeney. “But if they don’t swing at it because it’s too big or they see it, then really how good is that pitch if it ends up being a ball? The plate’s 17 inches. What are we chasing when we’re teaching pitchers swing-and-miss stuff? Are we teaching the numbers, the break? Or are we chasing outs and how to build outs?”

In summary, it’s probably a good idea to find some way to make life more strenuous for a pitcher once he steps onto the mound. It would just be ideal if the new wrinkle didn’t drive up the league-wide walk rate. — Meisel

How many injuries will be too many, or does it not matter and is just the cost at this point? – James S.

It certainly matters to the pitchers who get hurt! I don’t think it’s a binary question, exactly, but the answer does tilt closer toward “Arm injuries are just the cost of doing business these days.” If you ask certain surgeons or former pitchers, there are currently “too many injuries” and there is a direct correlation to the way pitchers train, which is a direct result of the obsession with missing bats. The challenge is going to be putting the toothpaste back in the tube. I’m not sure how you do that. Part of the problem with the phenomenon is that it works. Teams are better at preventing runs than they used to be. And if you prevent runs, you have a better chance of winning. So the intended consequences are still outpacing the unintended consequences. – McCullough

What do you think are the main takeaways from this series that can help us as fans bridge the gap with others who think about and enjoy baseball differently? Or does this series force us to accept that pitching is too good, hitting is too hard, and velocity is worth the injury risk? — Brendan M.

It may be true that pitching is too good, hitting too hard and velocity too valuable for pitchers to fret about arm injuries, but this series certainly doesn’t force anyone to accept all of that as fact. We wanted to develop an understanding of how baseball had gotten to this point of such imbalance between pitchers and hitters, and deliver that in such a way to connect with both those who see it as a crisis and those shrugging their shoulders about all the strikeouts (“I find a K to be much more exciting than an infield pop up”).

What bridges the gap, in my mind, is if both sides are telling the same story about how we got here. Hopefully this series has gotten us closer to that. For as much good work has been done regarding the swing revolution, far less attention has been paid to how pitch-tracking technology unlocked new insights, how the industry’s obsession with efficiency fueled the spread of the swing-and-miss gospel, and how that trend led to pitchers throwing harder, spinning more and hurting themselves more than ever. Those, to me, are the takeaways.

What should be done about it? That part is for debate. Pitchers could choose to change course. Hitters could, too. We wrote out the calculus for why they haven’t yet. The league has already made it clear that bringing more action to the game is a priority, so I can’t imagine we’ve seen the last of the rule changes designed to combat the all-gas-no-brakes nature of pitching today.

I’ll leave you with something we left out of the series that speaks to how drastically the game has changed: the vanishing soft-tosser. There are as many MLB starters averaging 97 mph on four-seam fastballs as are averaging less than 90 mph. Nationals right-hander Trevor Williams’ heater averages 89.1 mph. This is not by choice. “Every year I try to throw 100,” he said, laughing. “Truly. I huff and puff, dude.” Watching Williams work is like stepping back in time. He has exceptional command. He pitches to contact. He rarely misses bats. Yet he had a 2.22 ERA before an injury earlier this month.

Even so, Williams wonders, if he was coming up now, whether he’d make the majors.

“I’d like to think I would,” he said, “because I can still pitch, throw strikes, stay healthy and get outs at the big league level. But it’s becoming extinct — because it doesn’t make sense.”

Williams digs today’s brand of pitching, even if it’s pushing out guys like him. He pitched with Gerrit Cole and Tyler Glasnow in Pittsburgh, and Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom in Queens. He’s mystified by 103 mph fastballs and wipeout sliders. He sees the beauty in a swinging third strike.

“You hear the crowd groan like, ‘Ooooh, he almost murdered that ball,’ instead of ‘I wish he got his foot down and hit it the other way,’” Williams said. “There’s a time and place for that. But it’s strength on strength. It’s the hitter trying to hit the ball 800 feet, and the pitcher trying to throw it 110 mph by them.”

That’s the missing bats era, for better or worse. — Nesbitt

(Top photo of Chapman: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)