I had the thought to try to measure the mix of offense, to see what years or eras had the most use of varied elements. The data produced sent me in a different direction. Since 1974, a period of forty eight seasons, the graph at this spreadsheet shows the rates of producing various elements per plate appearance per season.

The graph represents the following elements:

• Total Hits
• Singles
• Doubles
• Triples
• Home Runs
• Free Passes (Walks + HBP)
• Strikeouts

We know that there are now more strikeouts than hits in a season, but what I didn’t realize that until 1995 there were more singles than strikeouts per season in the majors. So the trend of rising strikeout rates goes back a long way.

Strikeouts are supposed to suppress hits; fewer balls in play means fewer opportunities for said balls in play to find a hole in the defense. As you can see, however the rise in strikeouts happens much faster than the fall in hits. It’s not until the current surge started in 2006 than hits started their downward spiral. Given that doubles remained fairly constant and home runs increased, my hypothesis would be that the rise in Ks goes along with a rise in hard hit balls, which until recently balanced each other.

Walks are not really a problem. They are up a bit, but they were up the same bit twenty years ago and came back down.

I now wonder if we are going to find out how many strikeouts are too many strikeouts. The strikeout paradox says that strikeouts increase because they help both batters and pitchers. Pitchers who strike out a lot of batters tend to allow fewer hits, so they are more successful. Batters who strike out a lot tend to hit the ball hard, so they produce long hits and high BABIPs. At some point, however, this does not hold. There might be a tipping point, say at 25% Ks, where offense just crashes. Batters cannot collect enough long hits to make up for fall in overall hits, and we see runs per game numbers that make 1968 look like a slugfest. Let’s hope something changes before that happens.