If Robertson's long stride results in a release 12" (or 18") closer to home plate, any difference in deceleration would probably be in tenths or hundredths of mph, thus negligible. However, wouldn't that 2-2.5% shorter distance give the batter a bit less reaction time, about the same as if the 92-93 fastball had an extra 2 mph?

That's the argument as I understand it, yeah.

Yep, me too. It's basically equivalent to Robertson pitching from a mound at 59'6" away if he had a typical stride.

Intuitively, it does seem like a low offense era would easier to win a triple crown -- mainly because you need the RBI title. It would just seem in a higher offense era, there's more room for random noise and fluctuation, so you get some Vinny Castilla type driving in 140 or something.

...oh, and I'll take the under on Pujols finishing at .312 with 34 HRs. His season is 15% done and he ain't getting a do over on his first 101 PAs (.208/.255/.292 with 0 HRs) -- he may be Pujols of old from here on out starting today, but even if posts his career averages (and mind you, it's really been about 4 years since he's done that), he still comes up noticeably short of those numbers by the back of my napkin. I'm betting he finishes around .280/.350/.500 with 25-30 HRs.

Intuitively, it does seem like a low offense era would easier to win a triple crown -- mainly because you need the RBI title.

That was my thinking, in part because if there are fewer runs to spread around, then the self-driven runs on homers should carry more heft in the RBI race.

So let’s say that by 2022 the strikeout rate is 9.0 strikeouts/game. What, exactly, would be wrong with that? How will this all of a sudden not make any of us like baseball anymore?

What’s wrong with it is that strikeouts are boring. Seriously.

They are indeed, but the problem isn't that they can't be exciting in certain contexts, it's that there are just so goddam many of them, especially from players who have little or no real power. It's positively offensive to see someone who averages 8 home runs a year strike out time after time and never make an attempt to adjust his swing.

That was my thinking, in part because if there are fewer runs to spread around, then the self-driven runs on homers should carry more heft in the RBI race.

Yeah, I always thought the reason no one was able to do it in the sillyball era was simply cuz there were SO many great hitters competing against each other every season.

That said, in the last two decades, there have been 6 players who've led the league in all 3 categories at one time or another in their careers. Five are guys you'd likely guess right away - Bonds, Pujols, Manny, A-Rod, and as of last year, Miggy Cabrera. The other is the immortal Andres Galarraga, who milked Coors Field for all it was worth.

Bonds likely would have won the Triple Crown in both 2002 and 2004 if he wasn't walked 200 times a year.

With 14-16 teams per league, there are far more qualifiers for each category than in the old 8-team structure. Therefore less likelihood for a Triple Crown.

Plus what everyone else said.

With 14-16 teams per league, there are far more qualifiers for each category than in the old 8-team structure. Therefore less likelihood for a Triple Crown.

It is interesting, though, that according to Bill:

About 1970 there was a pretty SUDDEN drop in the number of players leading their team in all three categories.

Now, obviously there was expansion in 1969, but it wasn't from 16 to 30. So it's surprising that the effect would be sudden, rather than gradual.

DA-

About 1970 there was a pretty SUDDEN drop in the number of players leading their team in all three categories.

Yep, me too. It's basically equivalent to Robertson pitching from a mound at 59'6" away if he had a typical stride.

If it were practical (which it is not), the ideal measurement would be measure the time the ball travels from the pitcher's hand to the front of the plate, and multiply it by 82.27... to give a practical MPH.

About 1970 there was a pretty SUDDEN drop in the number of players leading their team in all three categories.

Coincidentally, the five-tool superstars of the 60s all got old about that time (e.g. Mays, F. Robinson, Aaron) and they weren't replaced by a new set of 5-toolers.

What’s wrong with it is that strikeouts are boring. Seriously. Strikeouts reduce the number of baserunner/fielder contests, which are a central part of the game’s appeal.

I love watching strikeouts, and find them much more exciting than a popup to the infield or a grounder to second.

Most fielding plays are routine and boring. But all strikeouts - except for strikeouts of pitchers, which are retarded, as are the people who enjoy watching pitchers hit - are exciting.

It’s like saying “suppose that in the NBA the game became a 3-point shooting contest, with no more dribble/drive penetration. What’s wrong with that?” What’s wrong with it is that something exciting has been taken out of the game.

Not surprisingly, I'd love an NBA with only jumpers and 3-point shots. I find those exciting, and I find the dribble/drive penetrations to be completely boring, along with the people who enjoy them.

So, yes, more strikeouts.

Not surprisingly, I'd love an NBA with only jumpers and 3-point shots. I find those exciting, and I find the dribble/drive penetrations to be completely boring, along with the people who enjoy them.

NBA with only anything is boring. You have to have a mix.

That said, you're nutso, everyone knows the most boring basketball shot is a jumper.

I love watching strikeouts, and find them much more exciting than a popup to the infield or a grounder to second.

I agree, except when the strikeouts are more attributable to hitter incompetence rather than pitcher awesomeness, which I think is the case being made by James and others in regards to them being boring.

I agree, except when the strikeouts are more attributable to hitter incompetence rather than pitcher awesomeness, which I think is the case being made by James and others in regards to them being boring.

Wait, you mean the same people who want baseball to return to the shittyball days of the 70's and 80's with a bunch of speedsters who can't hit for ####?

...oh, and I'll take the under on Pujols finishing at .312 with 34 HRs. His season is 15% done and he ain't getting a do over on his first 101 PAs (.208/.255/.292 with 0 HRs) --

Maybe wait a few more weeks. Last year Pujols entered June with OPS .755 (albeit with 9 hr) then had 1.006 the rest of the year. He was at almost 1.200 for June when he had the wrist injury.

Seemed like he was pounding the ball in ST; odd that the regular season has been so different, given his experience. Perhaps he's gone into the "Big Papi wretched April syndrome."

That said, you're nutso, everyone knows the most boring basketball shot is a jumper.

Free throws, hands down. Games where each team shoots 40 free throws are just excruciating.

Maybe wait a few more weeks. Last year Pujols entered June with OPS .755 (albeit with 9 hr) then had 1.006 the rest of the year. He was at almost 1.200 for June when he had the wrist injury.

Seemed like he was pounding the ball in ST; odd that the regular season has been so different, given his experience. Perhaps he's gone into the "Big Papi wretched April syndrome."

Yeah, but even .755 is an awful long way from .547...

I think the group wisdom here has identified the reasons for the demise of the Triple Crown. More players equals less chance for any individual to accumulate any black ink, let alone the crucial combination. It's not really that there are fewer triple-threat hitters anymore, given the cases that Booey mentions above. Though that factor may have been in play in the 1970s and 80s, and the early 90s, just because of a few individuals. If Rod Carew is winning an annual batting title, and then Wade Boggs is winning them, and then Tony Gwynn, the opportunities for a Triple Crown are narrowed. Conversely, if Mike Schmidt is the annual NL homerun champ, there's another set of chances lost. But more recently, high-BA guys have been sluggers as often as not.

it's that there are just so goddam many of them, especially from players who have little or no real power. It's positively offensive to see someone who averages 8 home runs a year strike out time after time

Isn't this a bit of a strawman? Among the top 50 last year in K%, only 3 had single digit homers. Yes, there's some guys who fit your description, but not "so goddam many"

I think the group wisdom here has identified the reasons for the demise of the Triple Crown.

One more: The park effects in the 30's were more extreme. Check out Chuck Klein's home/road splits, or Gehrig 1934. In recent times, the best chance was when a top hitter -- Larry Walker -- landed in Colorado. Coors field pre-humidor was a Triple Crown waiting to happen. If Frank Thomas or Manny Ramirez had ended up there in about 1995 we'd have gotten a couple.

who is this 'albert pujols' everybody is talking about?

in all seriousness ... last year he turned into ALBERT after a pretty cr@ppy start and still finished under .300 and under 100 rbi. iirc, if he had got one more hit in his last game he probably would have done both. i think he was batting with RISP in the last game of the year and his BA was .299 and a fraction ...

its too much to make up, though i guess we should not assume he's going to be out for two weeks with an injury like last year, so i suppose it could be done. but he needs to start the comeback TODAY.

One more: The park effects in the 30's were more extreme. Check out Chuck Klein's home/road splits, or Gehrig 1934. In recent times, the best chance was when a top hitter -- Larry Walker -- landed in Colorado. Coors field pre-humidor was a Triple Crown waiting to happen. If Frank Thomas or Manny Ramirez had ended up there in about 1995 we'd have gotten a couple.

Yeah, I was always waiting for this to happen too. The flip side though is that Coors made it that much harder for any of the non Rockies sluggers to lead the NL in any of those categories, especially RBI. Starting from 1995, it was basically a 50/50 chance that someone hitting in the middle of the Rockies lineup was going to be the RBI champ every year for the next decade or so.

Yep, 314 and 34 HR for the rest of the year is more believable than 314 and 34 HR at the end of the year so let's pretend that's what James meant to say.

On triple crowns: Expansion obviously but that does leave the mystery of why players aren't leading their individual teams as often as possible since, if anything, they're competing against fewer hitters there now than they used to. #20 likely gets at part of it -- over the last 40 years or so, HRs and Ks have correlated highly -- or they probably always have but in the past there was so much onus on Ks nobody was wlling to make that tradeoff unless they had to. Ks lead to lower BAs so I would guess that the correlation between BA and HRs is lower than it used to be. But, as #20 also noted, recently we have seen high BA sluggers (Thomas, Manny, Bonds, even Mac and Sosa at their peaks). Has there been a spike in IBB (and semi-IBB) of HR hitters? Bonds led the league in RBI only once! Here are some BA and OBP for Bonds with first base open career:

-2 293/597
--3 331/554
-23 288/675

Those are just staggering. Bonds didn't get RBI because nobody pitched to him with guys on base if they didn't have to.

Truly amazing. In -23, he had 30 hits and 153 walks. I would bet most of those hits were early in his career too.

I agree, except when the strikeouts are more attributable to hitter incompetence rather than pitcher awesomeness, which I think is the case being made by James and others with regard to them being boring.

It's not "incompetence" (in James' opinion or mine, anyway.) His pay site article a couple of days ago put it about as simple as it can get:

Strikeout pitchers are more effective than pitchers who don’t get strikeouts, therefore teams are always looking for pitchers who can get more strikeouts, and also looking to deploy those pitchers they have in such a way that they will get the most strikeouts. This effect would be offset by the tendency of teams to look for hitters who don’t strike out, if hitters who did not strike out were also better hitters. However, hitters who strike out are generally not less effective than hitters who do not strike out; hitters who strike out are generally just as effective as or more effective than hitters who don’t strike out. Thus, there is no pressure to find hitters who don’t strike out. This asymmetry pushes strikeout totals higher over time.

It's positively offensive to see someone who averages 8 home runs a year strike out time after time and never make an attempt to adjust his swing.

Hear that, Michael Bourn?

Players with 100+ SO, where SO>20*HR, 1997-2011


It's obviously much more common in the past four years (13 times) than in the previous nine years (six times).

District Attorney - Thanks, that's a great quote, understood.

I think batter strikeouts are one of those things in sport that appear incompetent. It's like faults on tennis serves. It is extremely easy to serve the ball without a fault; you can go down to the park and do it by the hour. But the price of extreme power and precision is a certain amount of faults, even double-faults, which the player writes off to the cost of the aces and other quick points he or she wins. Similarly, it's not that hard for a major-league hitter to get the bat on the ball, unless the pitcher is Roy Halladay on a really mean day. A bunt almost guarantees contact. But you can't just bunt and nudge at the ball all the time, unless you're Tony Campana, which is in itself a marginal status.

doesnt the above list give pause for our understanding of BABIP? All those guys above with the exception of Bourne are BABIPing at a far greater rate than average. I thought the general understanding was that BABIP was independent of other variables but this is a large data set grouped by free swingers and seems to show a correlation.

That's for pitchers, not hitters. And not exactly true for pitchers either.

I thought the general understanding was that BABIP was independent of other variables

Who claimed that?

A portion of what you're seeing is selection bias. If a guy strikes out a bunch and doesn't hit for power, well then he better have a high BABIP or else he won't be on the above list because of lack of opportunity.

But I think there's at least some small relationship between higher strikeout rates and higher BABIP beyond that bias, and there's certainly a relationship between speed and higher BABIP, which is one reason why you see so many center fielders on the list above.

I think we should probably pass a moratorium on the hand-wringing over the increase in strikeouts until we get automated balls and strikes, which in my opinion is an immediate priority. When that change happens, we won't know how that's going to affect things.

Hear that, Michael Bourn?

Bourn and Fowler, at the top of that list, both hit bunches of doubles and triples last year, and drew a fair number of walks, such that they both had an OPS+ over 100. Given that they're considered good defensive centerfielders, this makes them pretty valuable players. (I don't know anything about Bonifacio's defense, but a supersub with an OPS+ of 107 sounds pretty OK to me, too.)

And you want them to adjust their swings for something that is essentially esthetics?

It's definitely not true for pitchers, and one of my arguments from the beginning was that we may be better off trying to get at the pitcher's effect on BABIP from defense independent sources than trying to unwind it from the effects of his park and fielders and luck.

There's a clear relationship between strikeouts and lower BABIP for pitchers, whether that's the strikeouts themselves (probably not) or some other third variable like velocity (more likely) that affects both.

Also, a league average of a strikeout an inning wouldn't be "nothing but strikeouts," indeed it would still have strikeouts be a sizable minority of outs. It would just be "more than what we're used to."

As for basketball and three pointers, I'd be much more happy to see more three pointers than more "up and under moves" (traveling) and more "crossover dribbles" (carrying) and more "hop steps" (traveling again). Basketball set the rule book ablaze in order to make the game more "exciting," and in my opinion made it less so. So maybe folks shouldn't assume that what they think would be more or less exciting in a sport is the same for everybody else.

All those guys above with the exception of Bourne are BABIPing at a far greater rate than average.

From 40 or so years ago: Lou Brock didn't hit a lot of home runs, and he struck out at a rate which (at the time) was considered quite high for someone who didn't hit a lot of home runs. (His strikeouts wouldn't look so high in today's terms.) He did hit enough home runs that he mostly wouldn't have been on those lists. Anyway, his BABIP was pretty high, and pretty steady year-to-year in the .350-.360 range. (Except for the flukish split in the two parts of his 1964 season.)

34: Not to comment on BABIP to you of all people but...
What I meant was that the notion that BABIP clusters around a single point or tight range was only ever an issue with pitchers, not offensive players. There we'd look for deviations from personal norms more than from league averages.
Also, beyond K's/velocity, we could throw in pitch type (more than just knuckleball), arm slot, role, gb v. fb tendencies, etc... right?

However, hitters who strike out are generally not less effective than hitters who do not strike out; hitters who strike out are generally just as effective as or more effective than hitters who don’t strike out.

True but I'm not sure that's the way to put it. Strikeouts are bad for hitters. Even power hitters who strike out a lot are generally not particularly valuable if they don't also walk a good bit. So it's more that "take and rake" is a good hitter strategy or "guys who see a lot of pitches are more effective" or something.

BTW: I'm a little surprised that no one else has mentioned this. 3pers in basketball are massively increased compared to even just 10 years ago.

this year, in a 66 game season, 1213 3p shots were attempted by the average team (1507 pro-rated). 10 years ago, in an 82 game season, 1209 3pers were attempted on average. 10 years before that, in Jordan's heyday, just 602 3pers were attempted on average. Take it back 10 years more to the pre-Jordan era, and just 187 3pers were attempted by an average team.

This is a nice way to talk about Bill's point:

It’s like saying “suppose that in the NBA the game became a 3-point shooting contest, with no more dribble/drive penetration. What’s wrong with that?”

No one would notice if strikeouts kept climbing. Bill James didn't even notice that the NBA became a 3-point shooting contest.

in Jordan's heyday, just 602 3pers were attempted on average

Only because they let Craig Hodges play only 10 minutes a game. :-)

To the extent there's a problem with drive and penetrate, it's the number of fouls that result (and the number of fouls that aren't even called). The problem with the 3-pt analogy is that one of the outcomes of a good drive is a wide-open 3-pt shooter.

But I agree with your general point which I've made here several times. People here claim to miss the wild running of the 80s and would like fewer HRs. But even in the heyday of the running 80s, it was 2 SB a game vs. about 1 HR; at the height of sillyball, it was about 1 SB a game vs. 2 HR. I refuse to believe such small changes ruin the "aesthetics" of the game one way or the other. Ks have been the biggest change though so I'm willing to entertain that shift has made a difference.

I refuse to believe such small changes ruin the "aesthetics" of the game one way or the other.

Really? I mean these are pretty vast differences.

The only thing I'm sure of is that, 30 or 40 years from now, baseball (and basketball) won't look the way it does today.

I'll be old, so I probabaly won't like it, but I expect the average 30 year old will like it just as much as they do today.

these are pretty vast differences

There's enough overlap that you might not notice it overmuch, depending on what teams you were watching. In the 1975-85 decade I followed the Phillies, who stole a bit more than they homered, in some years homering slightly more than they stole: IOW, they were somewhat like the Angels or Mariners I was watching as visiting teams in the 2000s.

But if you compare the 1980s Cardinals to the early-00s Cardinals, though, the difference would be highly noticeable, more like 1:3 vs. 3:1. Coleman vs. McGwire is noticeable.

107 PA's Pujols ain't getting back... and he's down to .208/.252/.287.

I'm not writing his obit, but in his crappy 2011 start -- he hit .245/.305/.453 and even his May was .288/.365/.387. Those were decidedly non-Pujols months, but relative to the league - his OPS+ was still around 110.

The only thing I'm sure of is that, 30 or 40 years from now, baseball (and basketball) won't look the way it does today.

I'll be old, so I probabaly won't like it, but I expect the average 30 year old will like it just as much as they do today.

But all those punk a$$ 30 year olds will be wrong. And as senior citizens, it'll be our responsibility to remind them of that at every opportunity. Everyone knows sports peaked in (insert decade of your youth). It's a scientific fact.

About 1970 there was a pretty SUDDEN drop in the number of players leading their team in all three categories.

I decided to check this statement, because James has been saying this for quite some time now--turns out, it's absolutely NOT true. The number of team triple crown winners was trending downwards through the late 50's early 60's, saw an upsurge in the middle 60s, then stayed pretty constant until the years 1974-1976 when it went to 1,3,0. But then it picked up and by 1979, there were 10 team triple crown winners, the most since 1950.

Some notable team triple crown winners include Don Demeter, Roman Mejias (who??), and Ed Charles, who put up a scintillating 9/62/.286 for the 1966 KC A's

107 PA's Pujols ain't getting back... and he's down to .208/.252/.287.

I'm not writing his obit, but in his crappy 2011 start -- he hit .245/.305/.453 and even his May was .288/.365/.387. Those were decidedly non-Pujols months, but relative to the league - his OPS+ was still around 110.

this is a good point, i remember his start as being substandard, and not the crater that he's experiencing this year. i'd definitely take the under at this point if i was a gambling type.

After going 0-4 tonight, Pujols is down to hitting .194 with a .505 OPS.

Is this a league strength issue? It seems that in recent years numerous NL stars come to the AL and have unexpected struggles.

Scoring is higher in the AL, but any amount of that that isn't the DH (if any of it isn't the DH) could be due to the AL having weaker pitching just as well as to the AL having better hitting. It doesn't seem likely that the AL has better pitching, in any case. Pitching in the AL East and Central, in particular, looks to be in shambles. Of course, Pujols plays in the West, where pitching is pretty strong (though how much of that is the pitching and how much of it is the stadiums and weak offenses?). In other words, I think there are too many variables to separate from each other to tell how strong the leagues are. It seems to be accepted among certain saber types, especially the Fangraphs set, that the AL is stronger than the NL. I haven't been able to understand why.