Strikeouts, Strikeouts, Everywhere

For the first 50 or so years of modern baseball, batters would walk about as often as they struck out. In fact, through the 1956 seasons, batters historically had walked MORE than they struck out. The walk and the strikeout were two sides of a coin; they beautifully represented the eternal battle between pitcher and hitter.

Things began to change in the mid-1950s. Strikeouts, after many years of staying pretty steady, began to rise very quickly, while walks stayed more or less in place. Starting in 1955, MLB set strikeout records every year for 10 consecutive seasons. Part of this was directly due to baseball expansion, but much of it had to do with the way the game had changed — higher mound, bigger strike zone, the proliferation of strikeout pitches such as Herb Score, Don Drysdale, Toothpick Sam Jones, Bob Gibson, Jim Bunning, leading to Sandy Koufax and Sudden Sam McDowell, which led to Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, etc. There was probably a change in the batters’ attitude toward strikeouts, too.

In any case, every single year since 1951, batters have struck out more often than they have walked, with the ratio growing and growing. You might know that in 2022, strikeouts were a bit down from the last couple of years. But walks were down, too. And the result was that this year, the strikeout-to-walk ratio was 2.75-to-1. That’s the highest in modern baseball history.*

*The strikeout-to-hit ratio is probably even more troubling — in 2019, for the first time, batters struck out more often than they got a hit. This year marked the fourth consecutive season of that being true.

I bring this up because while these baseball playoffs undeniably have been dramatic and surprising — if you like upsets and chaos in your sports, as so many people do, this has been an electrifying postseason — it has been pretty exhausting watching how overmatched hitters are these days. I’ll give you a few postseason numbers to grumble about — batters are hitting .213 so far, they’re slugging .355, and teams are averaging just 3.7 runs per game.

And, here’s the big one: Batters have struck out 493 times and walked just 141. That’s a 3.5 strikeout-to-walk ratio. That’s pure madness. If this were a boxing match, you’d want the referee to stop the fight.

With so many guys like Seranthony Dominguez out there, hitters are overmatched. (Kevin D. Liles/Atlanta Braves/Getty Images)

It has been a slog, plain and simple, especially because it doesn’t seem to matter WHO is pitching. They just keep coming out of the bullpen — men with names like Cody and Seranthony and Pierce and Matt — and they all throw 98 and they all have invisible sliders and they all have Bugs Bunny changeups and if one of these pitching beasts doesn’t have it on that particular day, then the manager quickly goes to another one. The supply is seemingly limitless. It’s like going up against the droid army.

Baseball is, to its credit, attacking some of its most obvious on-the-field problems. There will be a pitch clock next year to make the games go more quickly, something I very much like. There will be a ban on the shift to spark more offense, something I have mixed feelings about, mainly because I don’t think it will have the effect that they expect. There will be bigger bases to maybe make the game a little bit safer and maybe encourage teams to run a bit more; we’ll see on that one.

And soon, very soon, there will be an attempt to clean up the umpiring and strike zone issues. I am predicting right here that in 2024, there will be a strike zone challenge system in place, much like the challenge system in tennis. That would have been great to have on Sunday night; there were several questionable calls on both sides of the Cleveland-New York game, but the eye-catching one was a seemingly awful strike-three call on Cleveland’s Amed Rosario in the eighth inning with the Guardians trying to scrape together another comeback. Allowing Rosario to challenge that call is super-easy, it can be done in a matter of seconds, and it would have been so much more satisfying than watching replays of the umpire missing the call.*

*And yes, for you Yankees fans, Giancarlo Stanton could have challenged the very questionable strike calls against him; everybody wins!

BUT … the biggest on-field problem of all, I think, is the overwhelming number of strikeouts, and I’m not sure what can be done about them. Nobody foresaw a game featuring so many pitchers with electric stuff. Nobody foresaw a game with three, four, five and six of those pitchers going every night.

Nobody foresaw a game where batters would feel like their best (only?) chance was to swing big and hope for the best.

I don’t know how you balance those scales, but they have to find a way. Baseball is all about that balance.