{"id":938,"date":"2021-04-19T11:22:44","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T18:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mfooz.com\/bblog\/?p=938"},"modified":"2021-12-16T13:02:31","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T20:02:31","slug":"938","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mfooz.com\/bblog\/?p=938","title":{"rendered":"Plate Appearance Outcomes Over the Years"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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We know that the three true outcomes have been increasing in recent years, but I’ve never seen a good graphical representation of it. I’ve been wanting to examine this data for a while—a conversation with a friend last night spurred me on to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The goal was to track the outcomes of plate appearances over the years, categorized into plays that involve ball-bat contact and those that don’t. The greenish areas in the chart are the “contact” plays, and the reddish areas are the non-contact outcomes. The major takeaway for me is that, over the last 75 years or so, strikeouts have increased by about the same amount that in-play outs have decreased. (In-play outs are balls in play that are not hits, or, in other words, outs that are not strikeouts.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was surprised that the decrease in contact plays overall has not caused a proportionate decrease in the percentage of hits. The percentage of hits (singles, doubles, triples, and home runs) has stayed remarkably constant from 1940-2019, never going outside the range of 22-24%!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, the percentage of walks has been more consistent than I expected. It has been within the 7-10% range since 1936. Also, there’s no clear recent trend in walk percentage, unlike the case for strikeouts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although recent home-run percentages (2.7% for 2010-2019) are higher compared to the 1980s (1.9%), they aren’t that different from the “steroid era” (2.5% for 1990-2009) or the 1950s (2.4%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One way to look at it is to say that the contact plays (green) are “exciting,” while the non-contact plays (red) are “boring.” By that measure, in 1973 (when I started following baseball) 76.7% of plate appearances were “exciting.” In 2019 that figure had dropped to 67.3%, so one could say that the game is only 88% as exciting now compared to when I starting following it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, this is just a presentation of the data. I’m not getting into the reasons for why the percentages have changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miscellaneous notes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n