The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Batting average declines, but game time increases
There are myriad reasons for dizzying pace of pitcher breakdowns — and no easy solution.
NEW YORK — The major league batting average dropped seven percentage points to .242 in the first two weeks of the season, while the average time of a nine-inning game rose two minutes to 2:39 in the second season of the pitch clock.
Major League Baseball implemented restrictions on defensive shifts last year, when the batting average rose to .249 in the first 14 days from .230 the comparable period in 2022 and .235 in 2021. Last year’s final average of .248 was up from .243 in 2022 and .244 in 2021 — it had been in the .250s for most of the decade in the 2010s and the .260s in the early 2000s.
The average rises during the course of the season as the weather warms.
“No question it’s getting harder to hit,’” Kansas City outfielder Hunter Renfroe said Friday. “I think these pitchers are getting better and better every single year. You’ve got younger and younger arms coming up that people have less and less history against. And I think it’s one those things where it’s going to continue to evolve, and the hitters are going to evolve, as well. But to this point, yeah, it’s a lot harder to hit now than it ever has been, there’s no question about it.”
Average four-seam fastball velocity is 94.2 mph this season, up from a record 94.0 mph last year. It was 93.2 mph when Renfroe was a rookie in 2017. The total of 100 mph or more pitches rose from 1,107 in 2017 to 3,880 last year.
Right-handed batting average fell to .240 from .254 in the opening two weeks, while left-handed batting average rose two percentage points to .244.
Home runs per game declined to 2.0 from 2.3.
“At the beginning of the season all the pitchers are healthy, they’re not tired yet. I think it’ll trend in our direction a little bit as the season goes on,” said Colorado’s Charlie Blackmon, the 2017 NL batting champion. “But I do think there’s more specialization, partially due to the technology. Guys who do something well now know exactly what that is and where to exploit it, but that’s almost only a pitching advantage. You can’t tell me my metrics or the spin rate on my swing and tell me how to hit better, right?”
Stolen bases remained at an average of 2.4 per game, though the success rate declined slightly to 78.6% from 81.2%. Steals rose sharply last year to 3,503 from 2,486, for the most since 1987. Last season’s increase followed the introduction of 18-inch square bases, up from 15 inches, which reduced the distance between first and second, and second and third, by 4½ inches.
The average time of nine-inning games was 2:37 in the first two weeks of the last season, when a clock was introduced over the objection of the players’ association, set at 15 seconds with the bases empty and 20 seconds with runners on base. MLB lowered the time with runners on base to 18 seconds for this season, a change union head Tony Clark blames for a series of pitcher injuries.
Last year’s final average of 2:40 was MLB’s lowest since 1985 and a 24-minute decrease from 2022.
MLB estimates the change this year saved three minutes, and the increase is largely attributable to more players using timeouts. The average increased gradually last season from 2:37 in April to 2:41 in July and August and 2:44 in September.
Pitch clock violations dropped to an average of 0.34 per games from 0.84 in the first two weeks. Pitcher and catcher violations fell to 0.26 from 0.61 and batter violations dropped to 0.09 from 0.23. San Diego had the most violations with eight, and Arizona, Colorado, Kansas City and Tampa Bay tied for the fewest with one each.
Gerrit Cole, the 2023 American League Cy Young Award winner, is on the injured list with elbow trouble. Justin Verlander, the 2022 AL Cy Young winner, is out with shoulder inflammation. Robbie Ray, the 2021 AL Cy Young winner, will miss the first half of the season as he makes his way back from Tommy John surgery. Shane Bieber, the 2020 AL Cy Young winner, just learned he will miss a year or more because his elbow needs surgery, too.
That list barely hints at the scale of what has become a full-fledged pitcher injury epidemic, one forcing Major League Baseball to confront the realities of a new era in which velocity, spin rate and swing-and-misses are chased with unprecedented myopia and rewarded with unprecedented payouts.
The full list of injured pitchers reads like a Cy Young ballot for an entire generation, packed with once-promising stars who never fully returned to form and established names who will have to bounce back to remain in pitching’s upper echelon.
In the past week alone, Bieber, Spencer Strider, Framber Valdez, Jonathan Loáisiga, Nick Pivetta and Eury Pérez joined the group of pitchers who will miss time because of elbow injuries or surgeries. That group already included Cole, Ray, Shohei Ohtani, Jacob deGrom, Sandy Alcantara, Kyle Bradish, John Means, Luis Garcia, Lucas Giolito, Félix Bautista, Shane McClanahan, Germán Márquez, Liam Hendriks, Tyler Mahle, Jeffrey Springs and Shane Baz.
But expand the parameters to include injuries of any kind, and the true range of the epidemic becomes clearer: Verlander, Max Scherzer, Brandon Woodruff, Clayton Kershaw, Kodai Senga, Eduardo Rodriguez, Josiah Gray and Justin Steele are on the injured list.
It is easier to list aces who are healthy than it is those who aren’t, but that would risk tempting fate: The reality of elite pitching in 2024 is that, even for the healthiest of aces, injury seems like only a matter of time.
Though the problem is escalating, it is not new. For the past decade or so, MLB has seen the number of Tommy John surgeries required by its pitchers rise steadily. Ten years ago, renowned orthopedic surgeon James Andrews declared the rising prevalence of the procedure, which repairs the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow, “an epidemic.”
It has only grown since. When Andrews announced his retirement earlier this year, he summed up his explanation in an interview with MLB.com: “These kids are throwing 90 mph their junior year of high school. The ligament itself can’t withstand that kind of force. We’ve learned in our research lab that baseball is a developmental sport. The Tommy John ligament matures at about age 26. In high school, the red line where the forces go beyond the tensile properties of the ligament is about 80 mph.”
MLB is conducting a wide-ranging study of pitchers at all levels to examine the origins of the issue and help develop recommendations to address it, a spokesman said. That study is not expected to be completed before the end of this year.
The cause of the problem, most pitchers and baseball insiders agree, is multifaceted — though one would not know it from the way MLB and the players union have recently engaged on the matter. The union issued a statement last week offering concerns that the pitch clock, implemented before last year and shortened ahead of this one, is causing the jump in injuries because pitchers do not have enough time to prepare for each pitch.
MLB fired back in a statement of its own that cited a study conducted by Johns Hopkins, which has yet to be published, that it says found no evidence of correlation between pace and injury. MLB also scolded the union, saying its statement “ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries.”
But while the governing bodies point fingers, the players seem more than capable of understanding the problem is nuanced and difficult to solve. When he addressed reporters after a rehab outing last week, Verlander said that while it was easy to blame something like the pitch clock, “in reality, you put everything together, and everything has a little bit of influence.”
“I think the biggest thing: The style of pitching has changed so much. Everybody is throwing the ball as hard as they can and spinning the ball as hard as they can. It’s hard to deny those results, obviously,” Verlander said. “It’s a double-edged sword. How can you tell somebody to go out there and not to do that when they’re capable of throwing 100? A young guy comes up, throws one 95 and gives up a big homer, everyone’s like, ‘What the hell, man?’”
The emphasis on velocity and spin rate at the major league level trickles into the offseason, too. Oakland veteran Alex Wood posted a thread on X in which he said pitchers throwing at moderate and high intensity through the offseason — presumably to maintain or build velocity and spin rate — is “being overlooked” in the discussion about injuries.
“When I first came into professional baseball in 2012 as soon as the season ended I usually wouldn’t touch a baseball until at least December and I definitely wouldn’t be off a mound until at least sometime in January. I knew a few veteran players (All Star types) that wouldn’t even throw their first bullpen until they got to spring training in February!!”
Wood wrote. “If you told a young player today that they had to take 8-10 weeks off throwing in the offseason and couldn’t touch a mound until at least the middle of January they would think you were crazy.”
Indeed, MLB has tried to address the changing approach to pitching many times over the past few years. It cracked down on sticky substances, used to better grip the baseball, to try to limit skyrocketing spin rates. It implemented a three-batter minimum to prevent relentless matching up late in games. But at times, the concern has felt more aesthetic than health-related: The starting pitcher used to define games, to serve as the big draw, eat innings and ensure there weren’t more pitching changes late in games than runs scored.
MLB and its players discussed several solutions to this problem during their most recent collective bargaining negotiations. Scherzer, for one, was a proponent of the double hook — take out the starter, lose the designated hitter, a rule he and others believe would force teams to leave starters in longer. That idea, like many others, remains on the table.
Yet the problem is not just that teams are pulling starters earlier in favor of high-octane relievers but also that more and more starters are not as capable of pitching late into games when given the chance. The same problem exists when it comes to rules limiting the number of pitchers a team can carry: The goal of such a rule is to force teams to leave pitchers in games longer because they have fewer options to replace them. Pitchers knowing they need to pitch longer, the thinking goes, would have to limit the number of pitches they throw with max effort to throw more pitches total, which could reduce strain.
But many of today’s more elite pitchers became elite largely by building themselves and their repertoires around maximizing spin rates and velocity. Those who have had success and earned big checks one way seem unlikely to dial things back voluntarily. And if they do, more change could mean more injury risk. Changing how teams can use pitchers does not guarantee those pitchers will change how they pitch.
What, then, could actually solve the problem? Well, one hard-tofathom option would be to limit how hard pitchers can throw or limit how much spin their pitches can have. If a pitch is over 100 mph, for example, it’s a ball. If a fastball has a spin rate above 2,500 revolutions per minute, it’s a ball. The idea is, at the moment, as uncomfortable as it is unrealistic. But drastic change might be needed.
While no one aches for billionaire owners losing millions in salary to pitchers who cannot pitch, fan bases do ache for rotations picked apart by injuries year after year. Winning the World Series requires winning the war of pitching attrition, which often means playing the biggest games of the season without the very starters paid to pitch them. As data has forced the industry to redefine elite pitching ability, it also has diminished the definition of durability. The pitcher injury epidemic has reached crisis proportions, and a vaccine is nowhere in sight.
NEW YORK — Southern California quarterback Caleb Williams, the popular pick to be the No. 1 selection overall, will be among 13 prospects attending the first round of the NFL draft in Detroit on April 25.
The NFL announced the 13 prospects confirmed as of Thursday night, and SEC programs Alabama and LSU each will have three players in that group. The SEC leads all conferences with seven players in attendance, including Missouri defensive lineman Darius Robinson.
Alabama’s representatives will feature linebacker Dallas Turner — often projected as the Falcons’ first-round pick at No. 8 overall — offensive lineman JC Latham and cornerback Terrion Arnold. Quarterback Jayden Daniels leads the LSU contingent, along with wide receivers Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas Jr.
The Chicago Bears hold the No. 1 pick overall.
Williams is among three Pac-12 players attending in person, along with Washington wide receiver Rome Odunze and UCLA defensive lineman Laiatu Latu.
North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye is the ACC’s lone player set to attend, while Ohio State Marvin Harrison Jr. will be the Big Ten’s only representative. Toledo cornerback Quinyon Mitchell will be there, helping the Mid-American Conference match two of the Power Five conferences.
The NFL draft begins April 25 with the first round, followed by the second and third rounds on April 26. The draft concludes on April 27 with rounds four through seven.