When was that? 1930? Pick a year in the good old days of BillyBall - let’s say 1985. There were just 18 batters in the major leagues who batted .300 and qualified for the batting title. In 1978 there were just 16. In 1982 there were 16. It’s not normal to have very many .300 hitters. It started going up when the home run era started, actually; in 1999 it was 53. “Three or four a team” though has never been true, except maybe in the ludicrous hitting era of 1928-1930.
In 2018 it was 16; in 2017, 25; in 2016, 25. So recently it’s been as high as it was in the BillyBall era.
I agree the baseball of the 1970s and 1980s was better, more strategically balanced baseball, with many different approaches to winning. Some teams homered their way to victory, and some played Whitey Herzog baseball. I would be all for MLB taking some moves to increase stolen bases, and I suspect slash-and-sprint hitters will come back on their own.
Some strategies, however, are not coming back. Sacrifice bunts are usually stupid, and it’s not like that’s a new concept; Earl Weaver was a hell of a lot of ballgames and he bunted less than anyone else in the majors if Mark Belanger wasn’t up.
Just to note it. The current WAR leader (Bellinger) has 5 stolen bases and more walks then strikeouts so it’s not like getting on base and moving around is a dead art. We’ll see if he sustains it but OPS is the most important stat currently so there is still interesting baseball being played.
I can’t comment knowledgeably on whether the game was more balanced in the 80s, but man I miss Whiteyball. Stealing bases might not be the statistically best move, but it was just so much fun watching games when you’re always watching for the double steal. Cobbling together a couple runs out of infield singles, bunts, and stolen bases, and counting on your acrobatic defense to protect a two run lead. That’s baseball!
It is certainly never the case that getting on base will be a lost art, because getting on base is absolutely, positively the most important thing you can do to score runs and win games. It’s more important than hitting home runs.
Whitey Herzog put some great offenses on the field because he knew the value of getting on base. The 1982 Cardinals only hit 67 homers but they had a good offense because they got on base a lot. In 1985 the Cardinals finished next to last in homers, but first in runs. They got a lot of guys on base. In 1987 they were last in homers, but second in runs. They had a huge number of guys on base. His 1976 Royals hit very few home runs but scored many runs. Lots of baserunners.
What’s different now is simply that there is not as much emphasis on having to get on base via batting average, and an acceptance that drawing walks is important.
It’s worth noting that steals today are not, historically speaking, at low levels. There are more steals in today’s baseball than in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s. (Seriously.) The extremely high stolen base totals of the 1970s and 1980s are the historical outlier.
So why did that happen?
Hard to say for sure, but I think a big part of it was ballparks. Starting in the late 1960s, baseball started to see a lot of big parks with artificial turf. A large field - both to the outfield fences and with lots of foul ground - dissuades home run hitting, and artificial turf is extremely advantageous for baserunning. It is not an accident that the Cardinals concentrated on slash-and-run tactics; in Busch Stadium that made perfect sense.
Starting in the 1990s, those parks started to vanish, and to be replaced with parks with grass and smaller playing surfaces. Only Tampa and Toronto have turf and it’s grass-simulating (and Toronto is a great place to hit homers, anyway.)
The walk rate hasn’t increased dramatically. In fact, it was the same in 1978. Batting Average (.248 last season), however, has dipped below .250 for the first time since 1972. A recent high was .269 in 2006.
I’ve been thinking about this topic lately, as well, and I agree that this is probably one of the reasons. (And, thank you for opening my eyes, a few months ago, about the stolen bases of the 1970s and 1980s being the exception to the historical norm.)
A lot of those big parks that were built in the 1960s and 1970s were multi-purpose stadiums – parks like Veterans Stadium, the 1960s Busch Stadium, Riverfront Stadium, etc., were built to host both baseball games and football games, and as they were compromises between the needs of two different sports, weren’t particularly well-suited for either. Because those stadiums had to have enough space for a football field, they tended to have big baseball playing surfaces (including big foul grounds), plus, of course, the first-generation Astroturf rugs.
As those stadiums began to be replaced (in the 1990s and later), they’ve nearly always been replaced, for their former MLB tenants, with purpose-built baseball stadiums, which have tended to have smaller field dimensions (and usually natural grass, as well).
About ten years ago I was on a business trip to Phoenix and my host took us for lunch to a restaurant in Chase Field or whatever it was called, and our table overlooked the field. Although the roof was open, the had sun lamps sitting around parts of the field to get sun onto shadowed parts of the field. In Phoenix. It was so weird.
Stolen base attempts are down but so is the caught stealing rate. Some people blame the modern catcher but it’s more a function of analytics: players who suck at stealing bases aren’t getting the green light. There are a lot of players in baseball history who had no business stealing. Brett Butler, for instance. His 558 steals looks impressive but he was only successful in 68% of his attempts. Pete Rose was even worse, with a success rate of 57%.
A really good example of this is if you look at the assist numbers for great catchers. I’ll use Gary Carter as an example.
If you never saw Gary Carter play catcher, you missed something. Carter had an arm like a Barrett sniper rifle; it was unbelievable. He came out of a crouch and threw bullets in the blink of an eye. He was amazing. What’s even more amazing, though, is that his astounding arm didn’t dissuade people from trying to steal bases off him. In 1980 he had 157 tolen base attempts against him. In 1981, 94 in a sort season. In 1982, 173 attempts. In 1983, 161 more attempts. Over those four years Carter mowed down over 40% of basestealers.
Running against Gary Carter was just plainly a stupid thing to do; it was throwing away runs pointlessly. Today, no one would run against Gary Carter, or if they did it would only be with the very finest basestealers when pitchers known to be shitty at holding runners were on the mound. There’s no way Gary Carter today would see 173 baserunning attempts; hell, he wouldn’t see 73. It would just be nuts. It WAS nuts, they just lacked the analytics then.
Of course, the reverse is that if a catcher is really noodle-armed, you should run more on him. The problem is that if a guy is that bad, and you start running on the time, he’ll soon not be catching anymore. (They ran on Mike Piazza a lot.)
Wow. What’s even crazier is that those numbers don’t include the two greatest base thieves of that era (who, presumably, would have had among the best chances of succeeding against him). Rickey Henderson was in Oakland, and there was no interleague play then. And, Tim Raines was Carter’s teammate.
Yeah, that’s a good point; I believe Rickey set a record for stolen base attempts, not just stolen bases, in 1982.
Of course, basestealers were everywhere. Even with Tim Raines the 1982 Expos did not steal an especially noteworthy number of bases by the standards of that time; the most prolific thieves in the NL were the Cardinals, and the least larcenous team, the Phillies, still took 128 bases. Even then, though, the caught stealing totals were so high that overall no team was really doing themselves a lot of good stealing bases (individuals, like Raines, certainly were.)
This is off topic, but talking about Tim Raines reminded me - has any team in MLB history ever wasted more talent than the Montreal Expos of the early 1980s? They had THREE Hall of Famers; Carter, Dawson and Raines, all deserving. They had strong supporting players - in 1982 in addition to those guys you had Al Oliver winning the batting and RBI titles and Steve Rogers having a monster year and Tim Wallach being Tim Wallach, and somehow they didn’t win a pretty winnable division. In 1983 they had all those guys and two 17-game winners and Jeff Reardon and they went 82-80 while a team that was basically Mike Schmidt And Some Other Dudes In Baseball Uniforms won the pennant. They had talent out the wazoo. That was the story every year, they just pissed away so many opportunities.
