Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
May 01, 2005
Swinging Back

There's a good discussion going on in this post from yesterday about the relative merits of high offense on attendance. Let me sum up my feelings more consicely than I did there; yes, too little offense is boring, but too much is boring also. The drop in offense this season (so far) is to an historically normal level (if not a bit high), so I don't see a big hit in attendance based on runs scored this season. There's a difference between lower offense and low offense. This is lower, not low.

This is simply the pendulum of baseball swining back. We've had twelve years of high offense in which time the men who run baseball have been trying to figure out how to find an advantage in such an environment. They've mostly tried using a lot of pitchers, each in for a specific situation. Instead of helping, adding more pitchers lowered the overall quality of the staffs, keeping runs at very high levels.

In 2005, we're starting to see a movement away from the automatic use of relief pitchers. Complete game have almost doubled compared to the same period last year:

First Four Weeks20042005
Complete Games1528
Games Started702700
CG Percentage2.14.0

You saw a good reason why complete games are up yesterday in New York. Joe Torre followed conventional wisdom and brought in his setup man with a lead in the 8th, despite the fact that his starter had not thrown many pitches and was still effective. Gordon gave up a game tying home run. The increase in complete game reflects a "if it's not broke, don't fix it attitude" among some managers.

I'm going to need to do the research, but pitchers are being more efficient as well. I haven't really noticed high pitch counts in these complete games, but I'll need to gather the data to make sure that's true. Managers are not abusing pitchers to get them to go the distance.

Which leads to the question, is this better pitching or worse hitting? Most teams this offseason seemed to concentrate on acquiring better pitching or defense. The moves the Red Sox and Yankees made were geared toward cutting down on runs allowed rather than increasing runs scored. Remember the big story of the off season? It was decent pitchers getting big contracts. There wasn't a huge market for either Carlos Delgado or Beltran. By thinking the offense is fine, teams don't make moves to cast off the dead wood, and you end up with players like Mondesi, Jordan, Womack, Dye and others on major league rosters.

So the drop in offense was the inevitable result of competition. Teams are no longer trying to build the most powerful lineups; they're trying to build pitching staffs that can win games. With money flowing to the arms, there's less to spend on the bats. I don't know how far it will swing toward pitching, but if it stays at 9.0 runs a game, I'll be happy.


Posted by David Pinto at 08:51 AM | Baseball | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Hmm... I don't buy the argument that because teams payed more for pitching, pitching got better. Yankees are the perfect example of the fact that $$$ alone does not produce results. I think it'd be easier to find a needle in a haystack than to show that the pool of offensive talent on major league rosters as a whole dropped significantly from '04 to '05. I think it's much more likely that the drop in offense is due to the fact that this is the first year MLB has a drug testing program with teeth.

Posted by: Jason at May 1, 2005 10:43 AM

Yeh, I don't see how paying less for hitters hurts overall offense. Just because salaries are lower didn't mean that Delgado or Beltran decided to retire. The only result of a greater emphasis on pitching would be perhaps carrying more pitchers. The hitters that get squeezed out of rosters as a result are the marginal ones. And losing those guys doesn't hurt the league average offense, it helps. I guess an emphasis on defensive skill might have a negative effect, though.

One question about tracking the effect of game-related trends attendance: how do you take into account the fact that in some cities you have to buy tickets at least 6 months in advance? Are you factoring in this lag somehow? If so, how?

Posted by: Sam at May 1, 2005 12:09 PM

The Sox/Rangers game is an example of a game it'd be nice to see less of. It's taken 129 pitches and more than an hour to get through 2 1/2 innings!

Posted by: Jason at May 1, 2005 03:17 PM

No effect on crowd size at all, as a record will be set in '05, breaking last year's.

Posted by: Al at May 2, 2005 12:10 AM
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