CINCINNATI -- One of the things I take pride in about Mound Visit is I never want it to feel the same. This is an unpredictable game. The weekly feature that dives deep into it should also be unpredictable.
So with that in mind, this one is on one of the original sins that sparked the analytics movement 20 years ago: Batting average and the .300 hitter.
While the game has changed dramatically over the past few decades, the vernacular of baseball has mostly stayed the same. If you wanted to ask me how I think pitcher X will perform in 2022, I could say, “he’s going to be a 5 WAR pitcher.” But is that rWAR or fWAR? Is fWAR the best way to evaluate pitchers because it’s based off FIP? Is FIP even the best predictive tool anymore?
Or I could just say, “I think he’s going to win 15 games this year.” It’s shorthand. If we want to analyze a pitcher, there are dozens of better ways to do it than citing their win total, but that stat clicks. People can immediately gather what I mean: This guy is going to have a very good season, maybe even be an All-Star.
On the hitter side, if you see a batter is hitting .300, then you can safely assume he’s doing very well. Of the hitters currently batting .300, the player with the worst wRC+ is Nicky Lopez of the Royals at 107. That’s still an above-average season. Sure, every once in a while a Ben Revere pops up and has three straight years batting over .300 with a wRC+ consistently in the 90s, but over the past 20 or 30 years, those types of players are outliers.
And of course there are better ways than just batting average to evaluate a hitter, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. Baseball Savant’s game feeds, the resource nerds like myself use to track the game, keep track of two numerical stats in their boxscore: Hitter average and OPS. With just those two stats, you can get a pretty good feel for how a hitter typically performs. If they have a high average and an OPS in the low .700s? They’re a singles hitter. If they have a low average and an OPS in the mid .800s? Then you’ve got a Joey Gallo walk and slugging machine.
And as the latter of those two examples becomes more and more popular in this game, the former is disappearing rapidly in 2021.
Entering play Monday, there were just 16 hitters who qualified for the batting title and had a .300 batting average or better. There are 13 players batting within .295 and .305, enough of a cushion that two or three good or bad games could decide if the back of their baseball card will start with a .2 or .3.
One of those 13 guys on the bubble is Bryan Reynolds, sporting a .296 average entering Monday. He’s had a terrific season at the plate, and whether one or two bloops falls isn’t going to mean much in the grand scheme of things. But it’s a point of pride.
I asked Reynolds in Miami if he has a calculator going to keep track of his average. “Don’t need to,” he responded. “They show it next to my face on the board every at-bat.”
Derek Shelton’s the one with the calculator. “There’s some hitting coach left in me,” he joked.
In 2018, only 14 hitters reached that .300 mark. The last time before that where there were fewer than 16 hitters with a .300 or better average was in 1968, the infamous year of the pitcher. That season, there were only six. The league responded by lowering the mound five inches the following year to raise offense and try to ensure that never happened again.
This isn’t even something that can be attributed to the sticky stuff that was running rampant early in the season. The crackdown for substances began June 21, and since then, the league has seen its batting average increase eight points (.239 from June 20 and before, .247 since June 21) and OPS jump 26 points (from .713 to .739). But on June 20, the last day before umpires began to check, there were 15 qualified hitters batting at least .300. That number has held steady for most of the year.
I won’t be Chicken Little and say we’re getting back to those 1968 levels now or anytime soon. But we’re inching that way.
Or to look at it another way, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. leads baseball in batting average at .321. In the modern era, the lowest batting average to ever lead the league was Dick Groat’s .325 clip in 1960. We’ve read about near record-low batting averages a lot this year. It’s affecting everyone, especially those at the top.
“It’s going to be interesting to see if that’s how the game is played going forward with the way the ball changes and the way the use of stick has changed,” Shelton said. “I think it will probably be something to monitor next year as much as this year.”
So what is this generation’s version of 1969’s lowering of the mound? Banning shifts? Changing the baseball again? Lowering the mound again? Who knows for sure. Maybe the game has shot the moon where people value batting average so little that it can be the new niche to exploit, the same way on-base percentage was in the 2000s and slugging in the 2010s. It is a cyclical game, after all. Or maybe it's not and is being phased out.
Maybe the game will change. Maybe the .300 hitter is an endangered animal. Or maybe enough players get those extra ground balls with eyes to make this all moot:
