Hitters struggling as offense fades in MLB

NEW YORK — Don Mattingly starred for the New York Yankees in the actionpacked 1980s.

Now in his 11th season as a manager, Donnie Baseball worries about a record lack of hits — and not just from his team’s bats.

“I don’t think it’s cyclical at this point,” said Mattingly, who’s in his sixth season leading the Miami Marlins.

“There’s so much swing and miss, it’s kind of off the charts. I think it’s something that we have to address.”

Call it the Season of the Slump. All-Stars are struggling, including the Atlanta Braves’ Marcell Ozuna (.204). Miguel Cabrera, the only Triple Crown winner in a half-century, is batting .115 for the Detroit Tigers.

Major League Baseball batters hit just .232 overall through the first month, down from .252 in April two years ago and under the record low of .237 set in the infamous 1968 season that resulted in a lower pitcher’s mound.

The Mendoza line may not mean what it used to.

Strikeouts have averaged 9.06 per team per game, on pace to set a record for the 13th consecutive full season — up from 8.81 two years ago and nearly double the 4.77 in 1979. Strikeouts already were 1,092 ahead of hits through April, just three years after exceeding hits for the first time over a full season.

Hits were at a recordlow 7.63 per game after fluctuating from eight to 10 from 1937 through last year, excepting 1968′s dip to an alarming 7.91.

While it’s a bear market for batters, pitchers are on bull runs.

Joe Musgrove of the San Diego Padres and Carlos Rodón of the Chicago White Sox became the second pair

of pitchers in a half-century to throw April no-hitters, the first since Atlanta’s Kent Mercker and the Minnesota Twins’ Scott Erickson in 1994. Madison Bumgarner pitched another for the Arizona Diamondbacks, but the shortened seven-inning gem in a doubleheader against the Atlanta Braves — the three-time reigning National League East Division champions had a combined one hit that day — was not recognized by MLB.

Mattingly, a six-time All-Star during a playing career that lasted from 1982 to 1995, never struck out more than 43 times in a season. Texas Rangers slugger Joey Gallo already has whiffed 40 times, as has Eugenio Suárez of the Cincinnati Reds.

“Pitching has always been further ahead in the analytical world, and applying information to the competition has been much faster on the run prevention side than the run production side,” said Detroit manager A.J. Hinch, a former MLB catcher.

“I have great concern that our sport has turned into a lack of offense and the strikeout-homer-walk ‘Three True Outcomes’ is not our best entertainment product. … We’re trending in the wrong direction. It doesn’t mean we can just snap our fingers and make a rule change or do one simple thing and all of a sudden we’re going to turn into a more balanced sport.”

Detroit finished April with a .199 batting average, on track to shatter the low of .211 set by the 1910 Chicago White Sox.

Just 16.6% of pitches had been put in play this season through the middle of last week, according to MLB Statcast, matching last year and down from 18.6% in 2015.

Perhaps it’s the Rawlings baseballs, which were slightly deadened this year in a change MLB said an independent lab found would cause balls to fly a foot or two shorter when hit more than 375 feet. Or maybe it’s the five teams that added humidors to their stadiums, raising the total to 10 of 30 with humidity-controlled storage spaces.

Data shows pitchers are throwing harder in the analytic age. The average four-seam fastball velocity was 93.5 mph, according to Statcast, up from 93.4 mph last year and 92.9 mph in 2015.

Batters have refined their swing paths in an effort to hit home runs, less distressed about strikeouts, and yet homers dropped from a record 1.39 per team per game in 2019 to 1.28 in 2020′s shortened season to 1.14 through April this year, the lowest since 2015.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred declined comment, saying it was only one month. Union head Tony Clark, a former All-Star first baseman, also declined comment.

Many baseball veterans try not to draw conclusions from the first month of the season, when cold and blustery weather can hold down offense. Still, a comparison to previous seasons through April is startling.

The batting average was the lowest through April since .230 in 1968, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. The .309 on-base percentage was the lowest since .294 in 1968, and the .3894 slugging percentage was a mark not seen since 2014′s .3389, according to Elias.