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May 11, 2005

Lies, Damned Lies

The Graying of the Game

by Nate Silver

I'm not breaking any news here: Offense is down. Home runs are off some 13% from 2004, and 9% from the average levels over 2002-2004. Slugging percentage and run production are down accordingly. This has occurred over tens of thousands worth of plate appearances: five weeks of baseball might not be enough to come to any conclusions about the performances of individual players, but it's plenty enough to make some inferences about broader, league-wide trends.

It doesn't accomplish anything to ignore the 500-pound gorilla in the room. It's entirely possible that this change is the result of baseball's harsher steroid policy. However, it's also worth remembering that offensive levels have often fluctuated wildly from season to season, usually with no apparent cause. Leonard Koppett, in his Concise History of Major League Baseball, became so frustrated with the whole fluctuation thing that he essentially just came to the conclusion that the ball was juiced for some seasons, and not in others, and that was that. Koppett didn't offer any proof of this per se, apart from the book's general message that baseball's history is full of incompetent and corrupt personalities, and it would not be beyond those sorts of personalities to do something like juice the baseball. In the absence of other explanations--why did offense shoot up so suddenly in 1987, and just as suddenly shoot back down?--Koppett found the juiced ball theory to be the path of least resistance.

The point is not imply that the ball has been juiced or, in this case, de-juiced. (It would, however, make for one hell of a Machiavellian conspiracy story if evidence emerged that the ball had been altered: I had a high school English teacher who had the habit of giving each student a C+ on her first paper of the term, in order to prove how much he'd improved her writing when she'd inevitably end up with a stream of As to end the year). Rather, the point is that it's natural for someone--especially someone as smart as Koppett--to seek explanations where none might exist. Broad-scale offensive fluctuations are certainly not random; the sample sizes are much too large for that. That doesn't mean we'll always have a ready explanation for them. The steroid explanation makes good copy, and it might well be true, but there isn't any proof of it.

With that long-winded caveat in mind, let's go ahead and play the blame game. If not steroids, well, what then?

It's been my impression for a couple of years that there have been a disproportionate number of good, young pitchers coming into the game. Here, for example, are some of the talented pitchers who have made their major-league debuts in the last five seasons:

2000: Mark Buehrle, Mark Mulder, Johan Santana, Barry Zito
2001: Josh Beckett, Roy Oswalt, C.C. Sabathia, Ben Sheets, Carlos Zambrano
2002: Brad Lidge, Jake Peavy, Oliver Perez, Mark Prior, Francisco Rodriguez
2003: Rich Harden, Brandon Webb, Dontrelle Willis, Jerome Williams
2004: Zack Greinke