The SillyBall: the Juiced Baseball
(One of several "White Papers" on baseball analysis to be found on this site--see the Site Directory below.)
The Explosion in Baseball OffenseSense and NonsenseThe arguments--one can scarcely call them discussions--in baseball about the undeniable and overwhelming increase in offensive statistics across the board dating from the early 1990s have produced much heat and little light. In the course of those "discussions," a great number of red herrings have been dragged across the trail to the truth. Retired pitchers in the broadcast booth will tell you it's the ineptitude of the current pitchers; retired batters will tell you that it's the bigger, stronger hitters of today; or it's the new crop of ballparks with changed dimensions; or it's expansion that has "diluted" pitching; or it's global warming.Now, because it's sensational, we hear it's a plague of steroids. Next, I suppose, will be anti-gravity rays from the planet Mars. And so it goes. Only a few--a very few will admit that it is, or even might be, the baseball itself. But, as the eminent physicist Lord Kelvin put it, "Until your knowledge of a subject can be expressed in definite numbers, that knowledge is of a most meager and unsatisfactory kind." So great a thinker as Aristotle could proclaim that men and women have different numbers of teeth: to an ancient Greek, the idea of just asking Mrs. Aristotle to say "Ahhh" for a moment was--like the idea of a baseball "expert" looking at actual numbers--more or less literally unthinkable. We are wise; we debate ideas; only the vulgar deal with facts. Well, then, let us be vulgar. We would like to try shining the light of facts into the darker corners of this matter. We ask that you be patient as you read this material, because we want to develop our case slowly enough that no one can say afterwards "Hey, whoa, how did they get from there to here?" (Visitors familiar with the literature of science may recall the now-famous cartoon with one lab-coated scientist looking at the blackboard covered with complex equations obviously just completed by the second lab-coated scientist, chalk still in hand, the first saying to the second "Perhaps you need to be more explicit there in Step 2?" which the reader can see on the blackboard saying "And then a miracle occurs!") Just the Facts, Ma'amHistorical Run Scoring NumbersSo, what are the facts we need to look at about this matter? Let's start with some very simple raw data. Shown below are the average runs scored per game played in each league and all of major-league baseball for the years from 1977 through 2007, inclusive.
The Historical BaselineWell, when we look at numbers like that, it gets a little bewildering: nothing exactly jumps out and bites us. OK, let's do a little cleaning up. The year 1977 was chosen as the startpoint for these data because that's the last year that the ball was officially modified (a new ball vendor was selected by MLB). And we know that the offense explosion began in the early 90s. So, we will take an average of run scoring for the years 1977 through 1992--more later on why that particular terminal year--and use that long-term average as a baseline for comparison. With that baseline, let's now look at each year's run scoring expressed as a ratio to the average for that 16-year baseline period.
The New BaselineNow something jumps out at you--or should. Run your eye down the table top to bottom and you see, especially in the all-M.L. column--how little the yearly values differ from 1.00 (which is to say how little they vary from season to season), until 1993.Looking more closely, the first thing to hit you as you just run down the years is 1987; well, we all knew that was a funny year--and sure enough, 1988 and on pick up the obvious pattern of rather small deviations from 1.00--meaning they're all pretty close to the long-term average, to "normal." Then we come to the early 1990s. In 1993, we see a pretty high set of scoring rates, though nothing beyond what we saw in 1987. But from 1994 on, it should be blindingly obvious that we are simply in a new world. Not only are the numbers all very high compared to the many previous years, they are strikingly consistent thereafter. So that you can plainly see just how consistent they are, here is the same data presented in the same kind of way except that now the baseline we use is the eight-year period 1994 through 2007 (inclusive).
The Two ErasNow let's really drive the nails home. Here, side by side, are the 14 definite Silly-Ball seasons (1994-2007, inclusive) and--just for comparison--the last 14 years (1979-1992, inclusive) of the baseline period. Each table is normalized for the standards of its own period.
Possible CausesImpossible ReasonsConsider what has to be involved in baseball as a whole increasing its run-production rate by about fifteen percent from one season to another (and not for one freak year, but for a steadily maintained basis). Over any one winter, the change in men making up all of major-league baseball is inconsequential compared to a 15 percent change in something as fundamental as run-scoring. If, for example, 10 percent of player personnel change over one winter, the new men would have to be either producing 250% as much as the men they replaced or the new pitchers would have to be yielding 250% as much as the men they replaced. Does anyone think that the new men in 1993 or 1994 were all an average of two-and-a-half as good (for batters) or as bad (for pitchers) as the men they replaced? Even if we assume that somehow all the new pitchers were awful and all the new batters superb, so that they split the causative factor evenly, we're still talking about men 125% better (for batters) and 125% worse (for pitchers) all arriving in one season never duplicated since. Please, let's not be silly, even if we are baseball reporters.(For the arithmetically challenged, here are simple numbers: if all of MLB was producing, say, a round 20,000 runs a year, then 10% of the batters were, on average, producing 2,000 runs a year; now, if the next year MLB produces 15% more runs--23,000 runs--since the holdover 90% are still producing their 18,000, then the new 10% must be producing 5,000 runs, which is 2.5 times the 2,000 their predecessors produced. OK?) The dramatic sharpness of the increase in run scoring over one winter, and especially its step nature--flat before, flat after--utterly eliminates any theory that relies on gradualness: increasing batting abilities, decreasing pitching abilities, and suchlike. The magnitude of the change makes any theory like that impossible, as does attributing the change to alterations in parks. Even adding The Joke In Colorado to the National League only raised run scoring there by a percent or two, and in any event both leagues jumped simultaneously. And the remarkable consistency of the new level over all the years since eliminates any intermittent cause, such as unusual weather patterns (believe it or not, there were some pundits claiming that for the reason). And the absurd attribution of the effect to steroid use? Sigh. It just demonstrates that there is nothing so stupid that some bozo won't go repeating it--as the French say, un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire. One used to hear regularly in dugouts and press boxes (before all this nonsense started) that "if muscles made home runs, Arnold Schrartzenegger would be the home-run king." (None of that is to say that no ballplayers are using steroids and suchlike stuff--maybe one in twenty is. So what? It's like corked bats: it's illegal, and using it is trying to cheat, but ironically it doesn't accomplish much. But fools are never in short supply.) Barely Possible ReasonsSo was there anything at all besides a changed baseball that could account for a sudden change in run-scoring at about that time? Yes, of course: expansion--which is why those who (for whatever mysterious personal reasons) refuse to acknowledge a changed baseball cling so tenaciously to the theory that "expansion diluted pitching." (What such fools make of the data from just before and just after the 1998 expansion, only they could say.)Now the first questions even a child would ask are "If expansion diluted pitching, why didn't it dilute batting too? Wouldn't they kind of even out?" Well, pundits don't have to deal with issues like logic--in fact, it is said that the their Union has rules strictly forbidding it. If we wanted to attribute an explosion in run scoring to some consequence of expansion, the first thing to do, it would seem, would be to look at the effects of prior expansion; this is not the first time that folly has been perpetrated, you know. We have already seen clearly that the recent change was not only a big step up, it was a big step up to a new and stable level of run scoring, one that has lasted eight going on nine years. So, let's look at prior expansions using, in each case, averaged run-scoring data for the five seasons before the expansion and the five seasons after the expansion, and see what has happened when this sort of thing was done before.
The first round of expansions cut run production by 4 to 7 percent. The second round, while it raised scoring, only did so by about 5 percent. (And, while we don't want to seem to be minimizing real data, do look sometime at the records for those years: 1968--the year just before Round Two--was an unusually low-run year for its times, while 1970--the second year after Round Two--was unusually high for its times.) In any event, the average effect of all four league expansions was precisely zip--a ratio of 1.000. Moreover, since the advent of the SillyBall, we have the additional evidence of the 1998 expansion, which would seem to really have screwed down the coffin lid on even the deathless vampire, Count Expansion:
(Here we use only three years because in 2001 strike-zone differences had a significant impact on scoring.) Ratios only 2 to 3 percent different make explaining big run-scoring increases by "expansion" an idea that is, as a certain sportscaster might put it, "Juuusst a little bit outside." And, to go back to the headlines, consider again those Big Bad Steroids. OK, we'll generously assume that either no pitchers use it or that it doesn't affect pitching ability at all (that's generous because otherwise improvements in pitching ought to at least in part offset improvements in batting). Next, we'll assume that every batter using steroids started doing so in 1993 or so--none did before and no more did after, except that new batters coming into the leagues must be using it at exactly the same rate as the men they replace (do we already see how dumb this is?). Now let's guess how many batters might have, all at once that year, started using steroids: fifty percent? That seems so ridiculous as to need no comment, but let's try it on for size anyway. That means that steroids must make an immediate 30% improvement in the average batter's ability to power the ball. When we get to assumptions like 50% of the batters in baseball, all at once, and instant 30% jump improvements--well, surely even a baseball reporter can figure out that that is, ah, a tad on the insane side as a proposition? (But perhaps not: never underestimate the folly of pundits.) (A much, much fuller examination of the effects of steroids and other PEDs ("performance-enhancing drugs") can be found at our sister web site Steroids and Baseball.) There is only one remaining thing that can cause big and sudden changes in run production: the baseball itself. The Only Sane ExplanationExamining The BaseballThe occasional stunts--there is no other word for them--that some sports magazines--not to mention the, ah, geniuses at MLB itself--pull at times when the possibility of a change in the ball is discussed are to make a cat laugh. Anyone with the remotest idea of how industrial product sampling and materials testing is done may need medical attention after reading one of those stunt articles. And of course--of course!--major-league baseball itself (and the ball vendors) always claim that they have been keeping a good, trustworthy eye on the situation and that there is no reason to believe in changes in the baseball. Of course, ladies and gentlemen, we believe you on your bare word: you've never misrepresented anything to the public before, have you? Of course we believe you. Doubtless it's just the Easter Bunny who keeps sneaking all those extra runs into the annual stats.But since this paper was first written, there have been credible scientific examinations of baseballs, two in fact: one was at the University of Rhode Island, where half a dozen professors labored on and off for six months doing a host of tests on balls from several eras; another was under the supervision of two professors from Pennsylvania State University's Imaging Lab, and consisted of CT scans of a number of balls from quite a few different years. You can read a lot more about those studies at a page on our sister site, the page called Changes in the Baseball. But the long and short of it is that the results agree excellently with the analyses here and in other places. There are also indirect ways of examining the baseball. They are obviously not as good as direct physical examination, but they are surprisingly useful. The chiefest of those methods is to track the resilience of the baseball through history by examining the ratio of total bases to hits (a measure described throughout this site's pages as the "Power Factor"). League-wide totals for extra-base hits--doubles, triples, and above all home runs--are pretty effective measures of the energy the average batter is able to transfer to the ball with his bat. Sometimes a double or a triple is a single-type hit that finds a lucky pathway, but: one, that isn't the case often; and two, the home run, a pure power hit, largely dominates the isolated-power (bases beyond a single) value. Because total bases as such depend on the frequency with which batters get hits, taking the ratio of total bases to all hits gives a measure independent of things which can vary materially from era to era, like batting averages and walks rates. The things other than the baseball's innate resilience that can influence the Power Factor of a league or baseball as a whole are not many, none subject to significant shifts in any short term. Indeed, they are just the sorts of things--improving muscularity of batters, changing abilities of pitchers, varying standards of ballpark layout, and so on--that those who, for their own mysterious reasons, refuse to acknowledge the modern Rabbit Ball try to use to explain the phenomena which we have already seen above can only be from the ball. Such things can influence, and probably have influenced, gradual long-term movements in league-wide Power Factors--but never sharp, short-term ones. Let's begin by just looking at how the Power Factor has looked historically, say over the last century. That looks like this: 
Well, we can plainly see a long-term upward trend, but there are a lot of odd peaks and valleys. Those all become much more explicable when we look at the same graph with some heavy annotation: 
There is a heck of a lot of baseball history encapsulated in that graph, and it would be nice to include the full discussion of all of it, but that would be too lengthy a digression for here. Let's begin, though, by remarking on some of the annotations. The vertical lines mark out various distinct eras; the slightly sloped red lines show the movement of the average PF within each era (we also included a dotted red line spanning the pre- and post-war periods but omitting the WWII years in its averaging, so that the essential continuity of the "Ruthian" and "post-war" eras is clear). The green vertical line pair shows the effects of World War I, the blue pair the much more drastic effects (owing to the much more complete mobilization of manpower) of World War II; the closely spaced brown pair at 1976-1977 shows the immense jump from the introduction of the new Rawlings baseball, while the purple pair in the early 1990s is the much-denied juicing we are discussing here. The Ruthian "rabbit ball" shows clearly in the big spike that is clearly past the WWI effects. Exempting the two World Wars, there are only two notable events from the turn of the century all the way to the early 1960s (note the dotted vertical line at 1961). The first, a rather minor one, is the curious little valley in the years 1906 to 1909; we will not speculate on that one. The second and quite dramatic one is the overnight (or, correctly, overwinter) jump from 1919 to 1920, with another huge jolt from 1920 to 1921, and smaller ones beyond. The cause is (or used to be) known to every schoolchild: Babe Ruth. Not that Ruth alone, mighty as he was, pulled all of baseball up when he converted from pitching to everyday play in 1919; no, it was that the owners correctly perceived that the American public was wildly taken with this then-bizarre new phenomenon "the home run" (prior to the Ruthian age, a home run was as odd and rare--and minor--a baseball event as a hit batsman). (That is to say, as odd and rare as a hit batsman used to be--since the SillyBall, pitchers are getting more aggressive about the plate, and the rate of hit batsmen has nearly doubled; other power-related phenomena, like intentional walks, have also skyrocketed.) The Lords of Baseball reasoned that if 29 home runs could make the turnstiles whirl, twice as many would whirl them twice as fast. Since not even Mr. Ruth could be counted on to simply double his production on order without a little help, a little help was duly supplied. It was supplied not only to the Babe, but to every mother's son who could swing a bat. The ball was "juiced." (That is, its resilience was deliberately increased; there are several simple ways in the manufacturing process in which that can easily be done.) The new ball was (and still is) universally referred to as "the Rabbit Ball" because of the way it "jumped" off hitters' bats. On the graph, there are red lines showing the pre-Rabbit-Ball average Power Factor and post-Rabbit Ball Power Factor. As you can see, the gap--especially relative to the preceding levels of normality--was huge (a jump of roughly 8%). The home run as an everyday phenomenon changed the fundamental nature of the game (the old era became know as the "dead-ball era"). In the years following the actual juicing, more and more players began to see where the dollar signs were painted--on the fences, figuratively anyway--and changed their hitting approaches accordingly, further raising the Power Factor. There were, as in every era, ups and downs (probably with external causes, from the Depression to the Korean War), but the long-term trend was--again, as in all eras--a slow, steady upward movement. As noted, WWII put a big trench in the curve, but the dotted red line shows the essential continuity of the post-war era with the pre-war era, and the continuation of the trend that had been reasonable and moderate ever since rabbiting of the ball had concluded, somewhere in the 1920s. Following the topping-out in 1961, things get confused, because the drain of young men into the Vietnam War, followed by their return at its conclusion, muddies the picture. But clearly, sometime between 1960 and 1970--and probably very early in that period--the long-term trend changed drastically: for the first time, the trend, not just occasional valleys, turned clearly downward. The change of ball vendors between 1976 and 1977 helped mask that trend by providing a whacking big jump in PF owing to a whacking big jump in ball resilience. But that could not alter the direction of the trend, which continued downward till roughly the mid-1980s. What may have happened in 1985, 1986, and most especially the still-discussed 1987, we don't know. But whatever it was, it wasn't permanent: the downtrend finally more or less levelled off at about 1.5, which (we feel) is a good and reasonable number. As we saw above, the era from 1977 on through the early 1990s was, saving the 1987 weirdness, a reasonably calm and stable period for both the Power factor and run-scoring in general, and--while it may be parochial bias from living through that era--we feel the numbers then were reasonable, right, for baseball. But others, with the power to implement their opinions, obviously felt differently. The post-1992 rocket-powered jump in the PF speaks eloquently for itself. It is just about exactly as great as the 1976/1977 ball jump was, and as instantaneous, and from the same cause: a change in the ball. Period, the end. At this point, anyone who can believe that anything but a juiced baseball is solely responsible for the past several years of hyperinflated offense is simply beyond the power of reason to sway; maintaining anything else would, as they say, make a cat to laugh. Game over, man, game over. Truth And ConsequencesTruthWas the ball juicing deliberate? As the mystics say, "Those who speak do not know and those who know do not speak." But for assigning blame (why blame and not simply responsibility? We'll get to that . . . ), original causes are no excuse. That is, it doesn't matter whether a desk somewhere picked up a telephone and called the baseball factory in the Caribbean and said "Wind 'em tighter" or whether the factory, for business reasons of its own, just happened to start doing it one day. (Aside: we say "a desk" instead of a person because offices seem to be magically self-operating these days; one never hears that "the Commissioner said so and so" or "the Commissioner did so and so"--it's always "the office of the Commissioner . . . ").Put the best possible face on it and assume that the Rawlings factory just found it easier or better or cheaper or maybe for no real reason started making materially more resilient baseballs a few years ago. (As it happens--we now know--they switched from hand manufacture to machine manufacture of the cores, and the machines wind those cores notably tighter than the women previously doing the work ever did.) At some point, though, surely by no later than mid-1994, it would have been--and was--obvious what was happening. That no one stepped in at that point and said "Hold it, let's fix this" is sufficient to justify blame. Moreover, it very strongly supports the idea that this juicing was not just a random accident allowed to proceed unchecked. One must never lose historical perspective. This wild ball-juicing did not come in the midst of an otherwise-calm era for the game. Rather, it dropped into the middle of the fiercest and most fanatic labor battles the already war-torn sport had ever seen. And, as we all know, American sports fans were voting with their feet--their feet, their dollars, and their TV tuners--against baseball. Isn't it utterly wonderful how coincidentally a huge boost in stats--a boost that has shattered long-standing and revered records left and right--just happened to drop into the game at a moment when fan interest was waning sorely? Utterly wonderful. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; humans are typically more obvious. You perhaps recall that a little earlier we remarked that one researcher wrote that Babe Ruth, playing under the conditions Roger Maris played under, would likely have hit 77 home runs his best season? With today's ball and season of today's length, Ruth might well have hit 84 or even 85 home runs. We are not trying to run down either Roger Maris or Barry Bonds: we just want everyone to understand clearly both that Babe Ruth was the literal "one of a kind" and that the sudden spurt of shattered records we have seen and will continue to see for a while are ridiculously tainted. And that's a shame, not only for the memory of the players of the past, and for the fans, but for the excellent ball players of today who know that their achievements are oranges being compared to apples; if the Lords Of Baseball could have left well enough alone, records of various kinds could and would eventually be made and broken--but by men who wouldn't have to go to sleep wondering how real their new records actually are. ConsequencesDefining the ProblemTainted records are only one of several consequences of an over-juiced baseball. As we see it, the fundamental problem is that baseball today--very much unlike even the recent past--is owned and operated in large part by men and women who neither understand nor even very much like baseball. They buy teams for business or ego reasons (or, most likely, both). As to business, you may safely ignore all the crocodile tears about big annual operating losses; quite aside from the wonders and marvels of modern accounting wizardry (of which we all of a sudden lately know a lot more), there remains the fact that any team for sale is eagerly bid for by a long line of very rich folk. If you think that such folk, or their business experts, buy a ballclub with the thought that they're going to lose money on it, you need a keeper. As the extraordinarily canny Bill Veeck once put it, "You don't make money running ball clubs--you make money selling ball clubs"; and Veeck bought and sold more than the usual. In years gone past, though, while there was virtually always profit available, it's only in recent times, with the obscene television dollars, that buying and reselling a ball club (with all the tax benefits too) has become so attractive a business deal as to draw investors as much for the money as for the intense ego gratification involved. (A must-read: Andrew Zimbalist's Baseball and Billions.) There's no need to name names: even the casual fan will have read the assorted and too-frequent horror stories about this owner or that showing their complete lack of grasp of even the rudiments of the game.In this age, baseball has been losing fans--especially the young fans crucial to the future of the game--at an increasing pace that is becoming alarming. The causes are many and various, but competition for fan attention, and dollars, from the two other big sports--football and basketball, which have done far more and more intelligent marketing than baseball--are the core problem. Now it shouldn't take a Harvard M.B.A. to see that what baseball needs to do to compete effectively is to emphasize its specialness, which is considerable and delightful. (It is virtually the only sport played much in America whose basics of play cannot be described adequately to a complete stranger in a few sentences.) Instead, what we see is an almost mindless attempt to change baseball to eliminate as much of that specialness as humanly possible, on the theory that the only way to compete with football and basketball is to emulate them. That means above all, to today's collective ownership, BIIIIIG scores and "lots of action". It is now perfectly possible for a knowledgeable fan to mistake a baseball final score for one from football. Can basketball-sized scores be far behind? The standard rejoinder to such remarks will absolutely, positively contain somewhere within it the word "purist," clearly used as an unsubtle synonym for "weirdo" or "nutcase." That is good P.R. by baseball; it automatically puts anyone who questions any of today's myriad horrid developments on the defensive without ever attempting to address the merits. (A Mr. Adolph Schickelgruber, a one-time house painter who did business under the trade name A. Hitler, was an acknowledged master of such P.R.) Seeking a SolutionPutting aside much that could and should be said about the current state of the game, we can focus on The SillyBall in this way: there is such a thing as an ideal ballgame score, and The SillyBall takes us far beyond it.What is an "ideal" score? It is a combined total of runs scored by the two teams in a standard 9-inning game such that: on the one hand, the scoring of a run is not such a rarity that the fan gets frustrated waiting for something to happen; but, on the other hand, is not so common that a run or two scored is a ho-hum, who cares? thing. Obviously, such an ideal score is the long-term average, and there will be some games that are extremely short on runs and some that are laughers; but those need to be the extremes, not the norms. The dangers of over-low scoring are well realized; the D.H. Rule was created exclusively as a desperate response to a perceived shortage of offense. But the dangers of excess scoring seem to be much less well understood by today's Lords Of Baseball. Exactly what an "ideal" score would be is to a certain extent a matter of opinion, but that extent is not a large one. A combined total of six runs (perhaps 4-2) is almost surely the lower limit, while a combined total of ten runs (say a 6-4 score) must be about the top. We like eight or nine combined runs, which happen to be the N.L. and A.L. norms from our baseline period--that is, just prior to this last juicing, scoring was probably just about right, maybe even a little high in the D.H.'ed American League (another snake needing killing). But surely the extremes of the range are about as set forth above. (Oh, and to be contemporary in our concerns: high-scoring games take longer, while three hours is about the outside limit for fan comfort.) To hear an announcer refer, correctly, to a four-run lead in the seventh inning as a "close game" is, or should be, perceived as being just flat-out obscene. The essence of baseball is run scoring, and what cheapens run scoring cheapens the game itself. Fans who want big numbers for the sake of big numbers can go watch ten men in floppy shorts score 200 of them in an evening, 2 at a time. The things that make baseball great are the things of the mind: the chess-playing that goes on at every pitch, every situation--the need for qualities like wit, grace, and pluck. To reduce baseball to a brute-force machine mindlessly cranking out runs by having the Before guy in a Charles Atlas ad rack up 25 home runs a season is to reduce the entire wonderful game to a batting-practice showoff exhibition. (The mid-season home-run derby now draws more TV audience than the All-Star game it precedes: think about that for a while.) The folk who are the real fans of baseball, the ones who watch or listen to or attend numerous games, not just the All-Star Game or post-season (in short, that is, those who very literally pay the freight for baseball) are going to drop off--or rather keep dropping off--while the here-today-gone-tomorrow casual fans of brute force and/or big, big numbers are not going to come over, no matter how wild baseball scores get. That's because however wild they are, football is still more brute-force and always will be, and basketball is still higher-scoring, and always will be. If The Lords Of Baseball continue their current follies, baseball will not go away or go out of business; it will just be reduced to another fungible trashsport like stock-car racing, good for filling up the idle hours on ESPN between real sports events. There is a rather well-known saying about how and how not to treat geese that lay precious eggs. Would that that ancient wisdom be heeded. |
