When Mark Teixeir a was drafted into professional baseball in 2001, brawny hitters mauled terrified pitchers and ruled the major leagues. Less than a generation later, run producers like Teixeira feel like hunters on the prowl for endangered species.
“There’s more talented pitchers — I truly believe that,” Teixeira, the Yankees’ first baseman, said after a loss last month to Jesse Chavez, a skinny journeyman who has blossomed for the Oakland Athletics.
“Because of that, there’s less runs scored, there’s closer games and more teams are in it. I don’t think hitting’s getting any better.”
It is not. As teams passed the 81-game midpoint of the season, they were averaging just 4.13 runs per game through Wednesday. If the average stays at that level through the end of the season, it will be the majors’ lowest mark since 1992. Strikeouts continue to rise; walks and home runs continue to decline; and the major league batting average, .251, is the lowest since 1972, the year before the creation of the designated hitter.
A stronger testing program for performance-enhancing drugs, more sophisticated analysis of hitters’ tendencies, a changing amateur scene, and, especially this season, a sharp increase in defensive shifts have coalesced to help the pitchers — with no end in sight.
“None of the stuff that’s come up the last several years has benefited offense,” said Joe Maddon, the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays. “It’s actually subtracted from offense, and it’s going to continue to subtract. Offense is going to go back almost to the dead-ball era. You’re always going to have several really good hitters — guys who would have hit well in 1894 and 2014 — but you’re going back to normal human beings playing the game, with none of the advantages.”
The 4.13-runs-per-game average is a full run lower than in 2000, the peak of the so-called steroid era. The major league on-base percentage is a meager .316, and the slugging percentage, .390, is at its lowest point since 1992.
The addition of two expansion teams, and the resulting influx of weaker pitchers, helped reverse that trend in 1993; two more teams would join the majors in 1998. At the same time, the sport’s leaders, reeling from a devastating strike, failed to recognize — or simply denied — the impact of the growing use of steroids.
“During the bulk of my playing career, in the ’90s, offensive explosions ruled the day,” said Jerry Dipoto, the Los Angeles Angels’ general manager and a former reliever. “But four or five years now is more than a trend. I think we’ve settled into this as the position baseball’s in right now. How many years it lasts, I don’t know.”
Buck Martinez, a Toronto Blue Jays broadcaster and a former major league manager and catcher, reached the majors in 1969, the year baseball lowered the mound in response to an epidemic of offensive futility. In 1968, the major league batting average was .237, Denny McLain earned 31 victories and Bob Gibson posted a 1.12 earned run average. The American League batting champion, Carl Yastrzemski, hit just .301.
“It was a beautiful game,” Martinez said. “Every pitch was meaningful. Now it’s home runs, home runs, home runs.”
It is for the Blue Jays, who lead the majors in homers and play at the cozy Rogers Centre. Most hitters, though, are far less successful when swinging for the fences. Martinez said hitters have generally struggled to handle this era’s newest mainstream pitch — the cutter — which moves on a more sideways plane than the slider. And hitters routinely say that pitchers, especially relievers, throw harder than ever.
This was a common refrain in the steroid era, too, but the prevailing notion is that pitchers throw harder now — even without drugs — largely because of the increased specialization at youth levels. Teams also encourage talented pitchers to throw harder for shorter stretches in the bullpen rather than pace themselves as starters.
“Vidal Nuno’s the starter and Dellin Betances is a reliever?” said David Cone, a former Cy Young Award winner, contrasting soft- and hard-throwing Yankees pitchers. “To me, that just crystallizes the whole situation. More and more, you’re going to see finesse pitchers in the rotation and power guys in the bullpen.”
If pitchers are not recording strikeouts, they are often daring hitters to put the ball in play. The avalanche of data in the modern game naturally benefits pitchers, who control the action, more than hitters, who simply react. Teams are more aware of hitters’ tendencies than ever, and many have responded with extreme defensive alignments.
According to Baseball Info Solutions, an analytics service that provides most teams with data, major league teams are on pace to use almost 14,000 shifts on balls in play this year, which would shatter last year’s record of just over 8,000. In 2011, the service counted fewer than 2,500 shifts.
This trend, naturally, turns many would-be hits into outs. Yet hitters, so far, have been slow to adjust, partly out of competitive pride.
“I think when hitters start to smarten up and use the deficiencies in those shifts, they’ll quit doing them,” Texas Rangers Manager Ron Washington said. “But, hey, machoism. They go up there, there’s a shift, and they want to bash the ball through it instead of giving yourself some room off the plate, taking the ball the other way, dropping bunts, keeping ’em honest. That’s the only way it’s going to change. But hitters today are stubborn.”
Washington said hitters had the talent to adapt but lacked the patience, knowledge and confidence to do so. For this, he blames the tendency of teams to rush prospects to the majors before they are ready.
Yet teams increasingly crave athletic players to help prevent runs in the field and create them on the bases. Athletic translates to younger, and the supply of talented prospects — anecdotally, at least — is thin.
Scouts routinely bemoan the lack of legitimate power hitters in college programs. Since the N.C.A.A. switched to a less lively bat in 2011, the college game has been largely predicated on stolen bases and small ball; Vanderbilt just won a championship despite going almost six weeks without a homer before the title game.
College baseball programs are allowed only 11.7 scholarships, fewer than other popular sports, and most scholarships are only partial. Further, argued the agent Scott Boras, the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, which essentially capped teams’ draft spending, has chased away potential power hitters.
“You have to have strength to hit,” Boras said. “Where are our strength athletes going these days? They’re going to basketball and football because our bonus structure has eroded. The N.C.A.A. issue and the bonus issue have got to change because the bonuses are not attracting enough people.”
Asked why the same issues would not also dilute the pool of power pitchers, Boras said: “Because pitchers are not strength people. To have a great arm you don’t necessarily have to have strength. You have to have strength to be durable, but you could have a natural skill to throw hard, and those are not athletes that necessarily play football.” Major League Baseball, of course, has no jurisdiction over the N.C.A.A., and the collective bargaining agreement is in place through 2016. Even if there were more scholarships and larger bonuses for amateurs, the effect on offense would take time.
Maddon proposed, somewhat fancifully, that advancements in vision could someday help hitters’ reaction times. And, theoretically, baseball could resort to gimmicks to alter the rules and stimulate offense.
But the industry has little incentive to do so. The average major league attendance, measured by tickets sold, was 29,801 through Sunday, ahead of last year at the same point. Crowds tend to increase in the second half of the season, meaning that average attendance will likely exceed 30,000 per game for the 11th year in a row.
In addition, despite low World Series TV ratings, baseball is awash in revenue. The sport reached an eight-year deal with Fox, ESPN and TBS for its national rights fees in 2012. The value of that contract was $12.4 billion, a 100 percent increase over the previous deal.
Brian Anderson, who calls games for the Milwaukee Brewers, said the defensive shifting makes broadcasts more entertaining, and not just for the added strategic elements to describe.
“There’s the visual of a shift,” Anderson said. “From a center-field camera, you see a rocket right back through the middle and your first instinct is: ‘Yeah!’ But there’s a guy standing right there. It totally confuses you. It’s good TV. It’s very entertaining to go, ‘Whoa, there’s a guy there.’”
For less dedicated fans, though, the lack of base runners may have a different effect.
With so many low-scoring games, Teixeira said, some fans might stay interested because their team, in theory, has a better chance to win. But others will not be quite so captivated, as Teixeira knows from the way he follows soccer and hockey.
“I want to see goals,” he said. “I don’t know the players; I don’t know the offense or the defense they run, or their strategy necessarily. If I turn on a game, I want to see some goals, and I think that’s the same way for baseball. If you’re a casual fan and you watch a game, you want to see guys put the ball in the seats and make it interesting.”
The game remains interesting for those who love it, and it probably always will. But baseball is different than it was just a few years ago, and nobody knows quite when, or how, the hitters can reclaim an edge.
Correction: July 3, 2014
An earlier version of this article misspelled, in one instance, the surname of the Yankees’ first baseman. He is Mark Teixeira, not Teixiera.