Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 431: The Rising Strikeout Rate Symposium

Episode Date: April 18, 2014

Ben discusses the origins and implications of baseball’s skyrocketing strikeout rate with a panel of experts including Harry Pavlidis, Rob Neyer, Brian Bannister, and Alan Nathan.

Play ball there. One down. Stay there. Give me the ball. Hey. Relax. All right? Don't try to strike everybody out.

Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls. It's more democratic. Good morning, and welcome to episode 431 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. My name is Ben Lindberg. My co-host Sam Miller is still sunning himself on foreign shores.

So I am joined today by Baseball Perspectus Director of Technology, Harry Pavlidis. Hello, Harry. Welcome back. Hello. So it's not just Harry today. We have a crowded podcast because we're going to be discussing and dissecting and debating one of baseball's biggest stories over the last few seasons, the rapidly rising strikeout rate. And to do that, we have brought together a panel of some of baseball's brightest minds from a number of different disciplines. And before we begin,

I'll introduce everyone so that you'll know who's who when we start talking. First, we have Rob Nyer, the senior baseball editor at FoxSports.com and an outspoken anti-strikeout activist, or maybe you'd prefer pro-contact advocate. You can follow him on Twitter at Rob Nyer. Good morning, Rob. Good morning. Thanks for having me. We also have Brian Bannister, a former Major League pitcher for the Mets and the Royals who endeared himself to the internet by publicly professing his affection for pitch FX data while he was still playing and actually used it to increase his ground ball rate by trading

Forbes seam fastballs for cutters, among other things. You can find him on Twitter at RealBanny. Hey, Brian. Good to be here. And finally, we have Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois and a physics of baseball researcher who contributes pieces to Baseball Perspectives.

You can find him on Twitter at P-O-B Guy. Welcome, Alan. Thanks for having me. Okay, so to set the scene, hitters have struck out in 21.1% of their plate appearances so far this season, which is up from 19.9% through the same date last year. And on its own, that's not a huge increase, but it's just the latest uptick in a trend that's really been

going on more or less since the dead ball era and seems to have accelerated in recent seasons. The strikeout rate has doubled since the 1950s. And now that more than one in five plate appearances is ending in a strikeout, we've sort of had to adjust our expectations, both in terms of what baseball looks like and how we interpret statistics. Because if you grew up watching baseball in the 80s or 90s, you were conditioned to think that a pitcher who struck out twice as many batters as he walked was doing pretty well. Now the league average is 2.5 strikeouts per walk. So in that way and other ways, we've really had to reevaluate what the baseline is. So today we're talking about what's driving that increase in strikeouts and whether the increase is a bad thing and what, if anything, Major League Baseball should do about it.

So I will tee up some questions, but feel free to jump in and respond to each other. So I want to start with you, Harry. As anyone who listened to episode 281 of this show knows, you, in a sense, have seen every pitch thrown over the last several seasons, or at least have seen a blob on a graph that represents every pitch thrown. And you do custom pitch classifications of every pitch

coming from the PitchFX data provided by Major League Baseball Advanced Media. And you can find your work at brooksbaseball.net and baseballperspectives.com. And so I asked you to take a look at what the PitchFX data has to say about this increase in strikeouts. So what have you found in terms of velocity and pitch type usage and the size of the strike zone and anything else that the data might help us explain this rise? Well, some of it's expected, some of it's a little counterintuitive. So the first general contextual thing is the strike zone is bigger. So since 2008, as there's been more standardization of strike zone, which happens to coincide with, I think, 2009 when they started using pitch FX

instead of quest tech to grade the umpires, the strike zones have gotten a bit more consistent, but there's also more strikes to be called. So as a result, there's an increase in the likelihood that a pitch you don't swing at will be called a strike. So back in 2008, that was only 50%. It was up all the way to about 54.5% in 2012-2013. So that's a 4 percentage point increase. And so far this year, it's at 56.9. It's pushing 57%.

So the strike zone may have become larger again. There's also the phenomenon of hitters swinging less by a little bit. There was kind of an increase in swing rate from 2008 to 2013, but it's now dropped off, excuse me, through 2012, but it's dropped in 2013. So it went from roughly 44% to 47% back to 46%, now around 44% again. So there seems to be some adjustment possibly that's going the wrong direction. Zone's getting bigger and guys are swinging less all of a sudden so if guys are taking pitches they are more likely to

have called strikes but when they are swinging you're probably about to tell us they're also more often yes uh it's kind of gone up and down over the years i mean mean, in 2009, it was 28% swings resulted in a miss. It's about the same this year, but in 2008, 26%. So it, that, that number hasn't really shown a trend as much as kind of an oscillation. So there's a bigger strike zone, less swings, probably more swinging strikes, at least so far this year, there's more swinging strikes per swing than any year in the Pitch FX era. But I should point out that 2009 is a close second. Guys are throwing harder. Now, there's a combined effect of what they're throwing and how hard they're throwing. And so overall, like if you just take all pitches and you don't care what kind of pitch it is,

the average pitch speed in 2008 was 80.8 miles an hour. Now this year it's gone all the way up to 84.4. So it's gone from almost 81 to above 82, kind of steady for a few years, then jumped to 83 last year, then 84. And when you break it down by pitch type, fastballs, everything's getting faster except the four-seam fastball. Sinkers are getting faster by about a mile per hour. There's no more guys throwing sinkers now than there were before. It's all about 22% of the pitches are sinkers. Fastball usage has gone down a few percentage, so people are throwing more off-speed pitches.

So that's where there's a slight increase. If there's an overall change in pitch usage, it's in the off-speeds pitches are being used more. And it's even coming out of the foreseen percentage. Curveballs and change-ups are about two miles an hour faster now than they were a few years ago. Splitters aren't really any faster or slower. Those seem to be kind of a different beast. But guys throwing non-split grip change-ups are throwing them harder now. So, and curveballs as well.

And I don't know if that's because more guys are throwing spike curves and knuckle curves, but, or on the change-up side just because they're stronger folks throwing change-ups or if it's technique thing where guys are trying to throw them harder i'm not sure but there's definitely more guys throwing hard more guys missing bats and more strikes being called so it's not just swinging and missing and contact. It's also a bit of the umpiring, and it's also just the fact that the pitchers are getting nastier. So really it's on all fronts.

Hitters are kind of at a disadvantage here relative to where they were before. Yes. So I'm curious, Alan, could you tell us anything about, you know, what the effect of increasing velocity by a couple of miles per hour is in terms of hitters reaction time and, you know, how how many milliseconds you actually have to make a determination of whether you should swing or not or, you know, how to tell where whether the or where the ball will end up? or how to tell where the ball will end up? Yeah, without being too quantitative about it, just being qualitative, two miles an hour doesn't sound like a lot, but it really is two miles an hour at the margin that really does matter. So the amount of time from release to home plate might be typically four-tenths of a second,

maybe a little bit less than that for a higher speed pitch. But that doesn't tell the whole story because the batter really has only a fraction of that time to look at the pitch to make some judgment as to whether the pitch you want to swing at and then make the decision to swing and then actually swing. So small differences in speed can make a fairly substantial difference in the batter's ability to react, difference in the batter's ability to react, especially if the pitcher is able to mix speeds. So, for example, a pitcher who typically pitches, say, 93, if he can crank it up to 95, and the batter is expecting 93, that's a substantial difference. And the batter is quite likely to swing late on such a pitch. So yeah, those small changes at the margins like that

can make a big difference. So Brian, how do you explain the fact that pitchers are throwing harder? Do you attribute it to changes in usage, just guys having shorter outings and just going all out from first pitch? Or is it a change in player development or guys training harder from an earlier age? How do you explain it? I think with the whole strikeout topic is that from the pitcher perspective,

and this is less of a scientific analysis of it, is that because hitters got so much stronger and so much better with the use of PEDs in the game throughout the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s, that the game of baseball naturally reacted to that improvement in the quality of the hitters and the strength of the hitters and found ways to handle the pitching staffs and for the pitchers to attack the hitters that reacted to that. If you designed a faster race car, then the natural reaction in the rest of the industry

would be to develop better safety equipment that would protect the driver. And it's the same kind of thing. I think the use of pitchers has changed dramatically, where a pitcher's attitude is now this is more of a sprint as opposed to, you know, decades ago, where you were expected to go out and throw a complete game. The training was different. Also, they didn't have the backstop of the surgeries nowadays

where if you pull out your arm decades ago, you were done. I think pitchers know they can go all out now with better training methods, better nutrition, just better knowledge of the human body. They can really go out there and pitch max effort knowing if I blow out, I still have a chance. And I think that's really affected the game because now as PEDs have been removed from the game for the most part, you've seen the hitters kind of come back to earth. But I think the improvements that the pitchers made during that period have been maintained

and therefore the pitchers are really, really doing well now while I think the hitters are taking a step back. Rob, do you think any of this has to do with teams getting smarter, in a sense? Either recognizing that strikeouts for batters are not necessarily such a bad thing and that strikeouts for pitchers are a really, really good thing and maybe targeting those guys more than they had in the past or becoming more efficient in some way? Well, I think that's probably true,

but it's also true that scoring is down. So it's not as if baseball teams on the hitting side have developed some magical formula for scoring runs because it's not happening. I think that all of these things we're talking about are far more organic than planned. And there's really no end to it that I can see. I suppose if the strikeout rates get high enough, teams might start selecting hitters for their ability to place the ball

and make contact, but there's certainly been no hint of that yet. And I think we're – assuming this trend continues, these trends continue for years, and I think they will, it'll be some of those years, maybe many years, before it gets extreme enough where teams start selecting for hitters like, you know, Brett Butler. What would Brett Butler look like in the majors today? I don't know. But it seems to me that if the contact rate is low enough,

there might be a place for more players like Brett Butler. And you were not particularly pleased by this development. You wrote something in 2012 where you called Ernesto Fieri the canary in the coal mine. Basically, he had come out of anonymity in the Padres' bullpen and become the closer for the Angels and was suddenly striking out everyone. And you took this as a sign that this is happening so often now, maybe we should do something about it.

And we haven't, and the trend has continued. So if he was the canary in the coal mine, I guess we have all suffocated by now. So why don't you like why are you against the increase in strikeouts? Well, and I do call it the strikeout scourge and sort of half jokingly. But, you know, it's something that writers do is they make up funny names for things. But I do think it's bad. I hesitate to say that it's bad for baseball. It's bad for me as a baseball fan. But I think we can draw some overarching conclusions

or make some overarching judgments at some point. I mean, everyone, almost everyone, agreed in 1968 that things had gone too far. The batting average in the American League in 1968 was 230. The Yankees batted 214. And something was done about it. Yes, there were people at the time who said, you can't change the game, it's perfect. But most people really thought that things had gone too far. Now, we're not there now.

The batting average isn't quite that low, although it's incredibly low this season. I think yesterday I saw a note that it was 232 heading into the game yesterday, which is basically the same as 1968. Now, the run scoring is not nearly as low. We have more walks now than there were then, and we have more home runs. So my objection is on a purely aesthetic level. I want to see more players involved.

When Ernesto Frieri or, better example now now kenley jansen or craig kembra comes into the game i don't want to see a two-person game where it's the batter versus the pitcher and that's really all that matters i want to see a 10 player game nine fielders one batter um that's an aesthetic argument um you could certainly make a different argument, which is that if scoring levels go low enough, which is where we're headed, ultimately, fans simply will lose interest. Most fans would much rather see a five to three game or even an eight to two game, I think, than a two to one gameone game or a one-to-nothing game. So it's really, in my mind, it's just a matter of time before everybody else jumps on this

bandwagon. I think the fans want to see home runs, because those are the most exciting play for the typical fan. Because those are the most exciting play for the typical fan. And so I think that's – so we kind of have this three-true outcome game where we have a lot of strikeouts. We have a lot more patient hitters because that's not just because of money ball, just because the game is being played that way. And that contrast, though, is we're starting to lose power, right? If you look at the

Cubs' philosophy is to acquire young power hitters because there's not going to be many of them because the pet era is over. So that's one thing that I think is a little bit possibly contrary to Rob's perspective. And the other is so much focus on defense these days and optimizing defensive positioning and shifts. So I see the numbers, and I agree with Rob on that perspective. But on the other hand, there's so much going on in the game where the teams are starting to recognize that it's not going to just be bashers,

and those are going to be real prize commodities. Like when we were young, when 25 home runs was a big deal. So there's, there's, it's going in both directions. So I don't know if they're going to have to do something like change the mound. I don't know. They'll probably change the ball again. That's probably what will happen. Yeah.

I still take a sort of perverse pleasure in watching Craig Kimbrell come in and, you know, strike out half of the hitters he faces. I don't know whether it's just the novelty of it. I agree that it could get to a point where it does impair my enjoyment of the game to some degree. So, Rob, do you have a solution in mind or have you weighed the pros and cons of the various approaches? I have. I think that it would take some really smart people, Alan Nathan, for example, but I would put together an entire team if I were working with MLB because any change that you make is going to have wide-ranging impact on everything else.

So you can't – I don't think you can just lower the mound. Yes, you would have fewer strikeouts, but you would also have fewer other things or more other things. I think it would have to be a broad-based effort to sort of balance, to reach the outcome that you're looking for. That would probably mean lowering the mound by an inch or two or three, ultimately. It might also mean deadening the ball. I think that makes sense as well.

So you're not rewarding to the same degree. All or nothing swings. And you probably have to do some things with the strike zone as well. Maybe let's just tighten it up a little bit or, you know, train the umpires better. You could not do just one thing. Or if you did, you would wind up having to address the changes there within a couple of years.

Alan, could you talk a bit about the various solutions? I know you've done a lot of work on what the impact of the makeup of the ball is and how much that would change how far the ball flies and that sort of thing. And maybe you could talk about the impact of raising or lowering the mound as well. Okay, let me talk about the ball first. Of course, changing the ball per se, changing the liveliness, the so-called coefficient of restitution of the ball, wouldn't directly affect the strikeout. But it might affect whether batters are swinging for the fences routinely or not.

By deadening the ball, the ball's not going to come off the bat as fast. It's not going to go as far. And so as an indirect effect, it quite possibly could reduce the propensity of hitters to be sort of swinging for the fences, which is one of the things that leads to the, to the big strikeout rate, I guess. Um,

you know, you could also mess around with the seams of the ball. Uh, and that's a little murkier. I think, uh, the seams on a major league baseball are already fairly low, fairly flat,

and it might be pretty hard to make them much flatter than they are. But that would affect, and Brian maybe could address this, that would affect the ability of the pitcher to grip the ball, put spin on it, and things like that. Regarding the height of the mound, that certainly had a big effect after the 68 season when they lowered the mound. had a big effect after the 68 season when they lowered the mound and you know my uh i i think again this is something brian could could attest to i think but i i think that with the with the raised mound uh when a pitcher is throwing something like a most pitches okay four-seam

fastballs uh other kinds of pitches probably most pitches other than curveballs, are thrown with an initial downward trajectory, which is sort of what you need to do for a fast pitch in order to get it over the plate. You have to throw it initially downward. And I think by lowering the mound, you tend to flatten out that pitch a little bit. And I think a pitcher, again, this is something Brian should probably talk about because I'm sure he knows much more about it than I do, but I have the impression that if a pitcher is throwing at a slightly downward angle,

he can probably get more speed on the ball. So raising the mound gets you a bigger downward angle, more speed on the ball. Lowering the mound, flattening the pitch out, you're probably going to get less speed. So I think the advantage, whether we fully understand exactly why or not, the advantage empirically is that you lower the mound, you're going to increase hitting. And so that's certainly one possibility. That would take some adjustment. I don't remember back in the 68-69 era whether there was a lot of grumbling at first

when pitchers had to get used to a different height mound, but I suspect it would take some period of adjustment for the pitchers. So, Brian, could you respond to that from your own experience as far as the seams on the ball or the elevation of the mound and its effect? Yeah, I think just from a pitcher's perspective, one of the interesting things about pitching off of a lower mound is that you tend to get more sore afterwards. or afterwards. So from a pitcher perspective, whether that would translate into more injuries, when a mound is lower, you kind of have less momentum as you go down the mound, and you end up having to bend more at the end of your delivery in order to get the ball to the necessary height in the strike zone that will give you the best results, which is usually

knee high. So most guys hate throwing off a flat ground or a flat mound just because they feel like it destroys what they're trying to do. But that definitely would have an impact on the strikeout rate. I think hitters would have less stuff. The angle coming into the plate would be flatter, and I think that would lend itself towards more contact. With regards to the seams, the minor league balls already have slightly bigger seams than the major league balls.

It's definitely noticeable as you make that jump as a player, and I think it benefits the guys that throw sinkers, the guys that throw change-ups, the guys that throw splits, and I think it hurts a little bit the guys that throw sinkers, the guys that throw change-ups, the guys that throw splits. And I think it hurts a little bit the guys that throw four-seam fastballs and the guys that throw curveballs, just because there's less of a seam to pull against when you throw. That's kind of been the thought of guys that have made that jump for the first time and talked about it, is that, hey, my sinker got better as I

went to the big leagues because the ball's a little tighter with a little smaller seams. So I think that's the reaction the pitchers would have if the seams were made lower. I think another byproduct of all this is just the way that pitchers pitch. Pitchers used to pitch a little more laterally. You could expand the strike zone. You could get that call an inch or two off the plate, and that was kind of a style that the east-west style that pitchers used to throw. And I think with the evolution of Quest Tech and then PitchFX,

pitchers just have the approach of pitch between the edges of the plate, and they've naturally developed pitches that are more up-down, you know, with regards to the splitter or the sinker or just how they approach hitters. And I think that's had a byproduct. That's a byproduct of how the game's evolved. And so I think all of these things, you know, as Harry said, I think the easiest thing to do to change all this would be to affect the liveliness of the ball, and then you're kind of opening a can of worms all over again.

I don't think you could bring the fences in. That gets kind of weird when you start altering stadiums. But even if you made the ball livelier, I think that would encourage hitters to swing harder or at least swing for the fences more often. And it could actually drive up the strikeout rate because if strikeouts are the problem, the hitters either aren't making contact with two strikes

or they're prizing taking pitches or going for the walk and taking a called third strike. And making the ball-like layer could actually make them swing bigger if they want to hit a home run. It wouldn't necessarily affect the strikeout rate, which is the problem we're dealing with right here. So it could bring back the home run, which would make the game more exciting for the average fan, but you could just make the three true outcomes baseball game that we have nowadays even more extreme by just increasing the home runs but also increasing the strikeouts at the same time with a live air ball so it's a huge problem

across the game and i agree with it and a lot of the solutions have their own problems that come alongside them if i could jump in in a second, actually, you guys may remember that a few months ago, this whole topic was discussed on Clubhouse Confidential. Bill James was the guest that day, and Bill said something that at first I didn't understand. He was talking about forcing the batters to use thicker-handled bats. He was probably thinking back in the old days, like Nellie Fox, who used this bottle bat, and he was sort of the ultimate contact here.

And I didn't quite understand what he was getting at, so he and I exchanged a few emails about it. And basically what he's looking at, this, of course, would never happen, because you don't mess with players' bats. But if he could, what he would do is he would want to effectively make the bats heavier. Making the bats heavier, in a sense, forcing batters to be more control hitters, contact hitters, than sort of swing for the fences kind of guy, which would then reduce strikeouts, probably would reduce home runs, but would increase the number of batted balls put in play.

So it's an interesting idea, and I think his idea would work, but it's completely impractical. Well, I was going to say, you know, Patil's been beating that drum for a number of years now, and it's an attractive idea, especially if you're a fan of Brett Butler's style of play like I am. But I'm not convinced that Bill's right, that it would even work if you could somehow get the players to accept it, because I think that the Brett Butler, Joe Sewell method, it might work when the average fastball is 85, which it probably was in Sewell's day, or 87 or 88,

which it probably was in Butler's career, at least early in his career. But when the average fastball is 92 miles an hour, I'm not sure if swinging a thicker handled bat slower, I'm not sure if swinging a thicker-handled bat slower, I'm not sure if that works. I think you just, you know, there used to be, these talk about hitters, they would say that, you know, you could knock the bat out of his hands because basically he couldn't swing the bat hard enough.

I don't know. I think that might be exactly what would happen if you tried to bring back that sort of strategy with a huge number of hitters. I think that they couldn't swing the bat hard enough to even make solid contact. Yeah, you may well be right about that. So, Brian, I mean, from your experience, how would you expect the trend toward higher velocities to continue?

Would you say that you think we're bumping up against the maximum of what a human arm can achieve or are we going to to see this continue to rise year after year i talked to a lot of scouts and um gms in spring training and they said what they've noticed is that the human arm hasn't gotten faster there There's just more guys, for lack of a better phrase, squished up against the ceiling of that threshold. And you've kind of seen this compression where the average guy is throwing harder, but the overall maximum hasn't climbed at all. And so I think you're getting your average pitcher out there in a game

throwing harder. And because the game is more of a sprint now, you know, you don't have your three-inning closers like you used to. Every single time a hitter comes into an inning, he's facing a guy throwing high 90s. And that's how the game's changed. You know, it's hard enough for a hitter to face an elite starting pitcher and have a good at-bat against him their second or third time around

once they've kind of seen his pitches and the break on his pitches and what his stuff does. And now all of a sudden, every time you go into the game, you're facing a guy with elite stuff, and you only get to see him for a handful of pitches, and that's it. And then the next time, it's white clean, and you're seeing a new guy with elite stuff, and you only get to see him for a handful of pitches, and that's it. And then the next time, it's white clean, and you're seeing a new guy with elite stuff. And I think that sprint mentality is kind of one of the reactions

to the steroid era as far as how teams have groomed their pitchers and which pitchers ultimately make it to the major leagues and have success. And all these characteristics were just pitchers fighting back against the better, stronger hitters. And now you're seeing it kind of backfire as far as the aesthetics and the enjoyment of the game because I think pitchers have done everything they can to be the best pitchers they can be as far as their training, their approach, which pitchers they work on and prioritize, how they attack the zone, all these characteristics.

And I think we're seeing almost peak pitchers because I don't think we're going to see 110 mile an hour fastballs in the future. I think we're kind of bumping up against the ceiling there. But I just think when you have millions of kids to choose from worldwide who are training in this style to ultimately be a big league pitcher, I think you're going to get 150 of those and pitch in the big leagues and they're going to be successful and they're going to be nasty. And the game is going to be full of those types of arms from now on

because we know how to get to that level and how to be successful to get hitters out and I don't think hitters have that same advantage anymore I think hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things you can do in this world and now the pitchers have kind of maxed out and hitters aren't as big and strong as they were over the last 20 years I think you've seen the game take a step backwards as far as an enjoyment level. It's kind of interesting, some of the things that I've heard in this conversation about the potential changes and kind of the unintended consequences and how things ripple through

the game. But one of the things that has kind of struck me the most was one of Brian's comments about changing the mound. And, you know, talking about being more sore because having to put a little more finish when you don't have the slope of the mound. And that seems to run contrary to something I remember reading some years ago about the more slope of the mound, the more injury risk there is to a pitcher. Because there's more gravity, therefore there's more strain.

You're exposing the body to more force. So I'm kind of curious what Alan thinks about that. But also, question for Brian, is would changing the mound in that way, would certain pitchers gain or lose an advantage a different way? You know, much of the way you talked about how the change in seams from, say, AAA to major leagues impacts different pitchers differently. How would the mound affect a drop and drive guy versus a tall and fall guy? Because someone like Tanaka, who is coming and just flattening himself out, it may be something less impactful than like a Jake Arrieta, who seems to just rely on everything just flowing downhill naturally. Yeah, look, let me just defer to Brian on these questions, which are interesting questions. As far as the impact on the arm, yes,

there is more force the steeper the mound. And the interesting thing is while there may be more force, I think as a pitcher you feel the impact of that less the next day. I think on a flat mound, you have to generate more and you have to finish more. And you definitely notice it in the back of your shoulder and your back when you pitch on a flat mound versus a steep mound. I distinctly remember one ballpark in the Eastern League,

and that was New Britain, which was the Twins at the time when I played there. They had an extremely flat mound, and it got to the point where guys in the league were actually warming up on flat ground because the bullpen mound was so much steeper than the game mound that guys were going into the games and they couldn't pitch because it was so drastically different. And almost everybody that had a start at that field the next day would be dramatically more sore than they would at any other park around the league.

And so pitchers notice it. Now, it could be more of an all-or-nothing impact, meaning a pitcher will be less sore pitching on a steeper mound, but may be more likely to blow out at some point because he's generating more momentum and more velocity down the mound. So on an average day, a pitcher might not feel it as much, but maybe over time it could increase the likelihood of serious injury because he is just moving faster down the mound because there is more gravity, there is more momentum. So that could be a more scientific explanation for it all.

But I think it would help the guys that are more on the sinker split side of the game as opposed to the guys who are more the foreseeing fastball. I'm going to be successful by having my pitchers rise above the bats and be more of a fly ball, whiff-type pitcher. I think you could see that result, and so the game would be skewed in favor of the knocker, somebody who throws a split with a flatter mound. But I think just once again, I think baseball would react to that

by prizing those types of pitchers. And I think the pitchers would react by developing pitchers that would be more successful off a flatter mound than a steeper mound. So you think it's more specifically with Tanaka, you would think his advantage would be just the nature of his pitch rather than his drop and drive approach I think when you're a sinker ball based pitcher you're using the force of gravity to determine the speed of the sink on your ball you can't make a ball unless it has top spinin, sink faster than gravity.

And so that's kind of a constant in how you pitch. Whereas a guy who pitches with a 14 fastball, you're really limited by how fast your arm can move, by how steep the mound is, by how much momentum you can generate. And the faster velocity, the faster the spin that you can create, the more your fastball will rise and explode into the zone.

So if you hamstring those guys by lowering the mounds, by whatever changes you make, I think that will impact the power pitchers more than it would the sinker ballers where the flat spin on your fastball or the lack of spin on your split finger it's still going to have the same amount of sink because you're still working with the force of gravity and you're going to lose a little angle on your pitches but i think i still think you would be impacted less than the big power guys so if they drop the mound you'll make a

comeback is what you're saying no unfortunately, unfortunately I was a forcing guy. So I never had the fastball to begin with. So the mound didn't help me. So before we wrap up, I do want to touch on just the change in pitcher usage because while it's not a one-to-one relationship, you know, the reduction in the percentage of innings thrown by starters is certainly tracked with the increase in strikeout rate. And I think we're up to something like 35% of all pitches are thrown by relievers now. And of course, we know that relievers throw harder and they don't

face that times through the order effect where they become less effective, you know, if they see a batter multiple times in the same game. So really the question of whether strikeout rate will continue to increase or increase at the same rate seems to me to at least partially come down to whether we will see a continuation of the trend toward fewer and fewer innings per pitcher used in a game. And, you know, I know Bill James has kind of expressed the idea that teams have taken this too far in their pursuit of matchups and the platoon advantage. And they're costing themselves by carrying too many relievers at the expense of bench players. And so now we see things like we saw in the White Sox-Red Sox game the other day where, you know, it's the 14th

inning and the White Sox are out of pitchers and it's a tie game and they have to put in a utility infielder because they don't have any pitchers left because, you know, they used four guys in the eighth inning and two of them to face one batter. And so they essentially had to just raise the white flag, you know, rather than put a starter in or just use their relievers more judiciously. So I guess I'll direct that to Rob. Do you agree with Bill more or less that teams have taken this too far? And do you think that we are heading either toward a return to, you know, maybe two inning relievers at least, or are we heading more towards the kind of Brian Kenney idea of just going with the all-reliever staff? Well, I think my opinion about this is

colored by my, again, aesthetic sensibilities. I would like to see fewer relief pitchers and more bench hitters. I'm not convinced that's the way to win. I mean, a lot of really smart people are running baseball teams and giving their managers seven or eight relief pitchers. It isn't the managers who make the roster moves. It's the GMs. And we know the GMs are much smarter than they used to be. I'm not saying

they're always right, but I don't know if they're responding to the entreaties from their managers or if they're doing this because they think it makes sense. I think they think it makes sense to get the platoon matchup and they get fresh guys out there who

throw 95 miles an hour as often as they possibly can. And I have to say, you're absolutely right. There is a connection between the increased use of relief pitchers and the strikeout rate. And one thing that concerns me is, you know, we're talking about ways, possible ways to lower the strikeout rate.

I'm worried the strikeout rate is going to – that baseball will actually do something to increase the strikeout rate, where it isn't organic, where I could definitely see next time the CBA comes up, I could see the union or even the team arguing to add a roster spot, have a 26-man. We already see it for doubleheaders. And we know, I think through experience, that most of those extra roster spots would go to a pitcher because the managers want them. And I presume the general managers as well.

And there's an endless supply of pitchers in the minors who can throw 94, 95 miles an hour. So we need to maybe instead of advocating for baseball to do something to lower strikeouts, we just need to be on the watch for something that will even increase strikeouts. So is this sort of similar to you wrote something yesterday about how we've seen all this wave of Tommy John surgeries, and maybe it's because the incentives are not really there to reverse that trend, because you've got pitchers and agents and teams who all benefit from getting these guys who throw hard and having them continue to do that, even if it puts them in danger. So is it sort of the same problem here where we have, you know, teams benefit from

pitchers who strike out a lot and pitchers who strike out a lot of batters make more money. And, and so there's no one except, you know, you or us maybe who are watching the game, who's really there to, to speak for contact. Yes, I absolutely think that's true. This is, Yes, I absolutely think that's true. This is an issue that is unknown to the great majority of baseball fans, which is why I think that in the coming years, the focus will not be or shouldn't be on strikeouts when we write about this for a mass audience, the issue will be simply run scoring. That will lead to change. If the run production goes low enough, something will be done about it. Nobody cares about strikeouts, but runs scored and ultimately attendance, people care a lot about those things. So to conclude, let's say that Bud Selig appoints us as his blue ribbon commission for studying the strikeout problem, which I think means that we have five to 10 years to deliberate before we come to a decision, at which point he'll probably

still be commissioner. I guess I'll just go around and ask each of you what your recommendation would be. Do you think that we should be in a wait-and-see mode for now, or would you actually advocate doing something right now, and if so, what? So I guess I could just go back to you, Rob. Well, two things, two overarching things. First of all, I would appoint this commission, um, as many smart people as I could find in different disciplines, but especially science, um, and history. And I would also, um, I would subsidize or purchase a minor league, maybe the Atlantic League, and I would start trying different things to see what happened on the field.

Alan? Yeah, actually, I very much like Rob's ideas. I would play a wait-and-see with regard to the major leagues. But yeah, I think experimenting with different things in a minor league setting to me sounds like a very worthwhile idea and appointing a commission and to study the problem make sure we understand all the unintended consequences that might arise from doing one thing or another I think would be quite important but I wouldn't do anything just yet other than have some blue ribbon panel study the problem.

Brian? I'll throw something out there that we haven't discussed yet, but for me, I think the simplest way you could correct the problem is to reduce the up-down size of the strike zone. You know, I don't like bringing fences in. I don't like changing the height of the mound. I don't like changing the liveliness of the ball or the thickness of the handles because that means you start messing with the game itself.

But if you change the height of the zone, then it forces all these power pitchers to have to dial back a little bit because hitters are just going to take advantage of the fact that you're not going to throw as many strikes. So one, you're going to have to throw the ball in the zone a little bit more. You're going to have to control your delivery a little bit more to get the ball in the zone. And I think it would also combat the run-score problem

because flat out, if you're not throwing strikes, you're going to be walking more people. You're going to be forced to throw more pitches, which also combats the way that pitchers are used nowadays where they come in to get one hitter at a time or come in and throw 100 miles an hour and face three hitters. and face three hitters, if you go out there and you can't throw a strike, you're not going to be able to have the luxury of just throwing as hard as you can to a couple hitters, and it's going to greatly reduce your effectiveness. So I think if you make the zone a little bit smaller uptown, that could actually combat a bunch of the problems without actually affecting the game the way it is now. Do you have any thoughts on the strike zone size issue, Harry,

or any other recommendations? I like that idea because my thing about this is the impact of the game. I do believe that we are, you know, up against the upper limits of the human arm and related parts. I mean, that's why we had Steve Dalkowski and now we have Aroldis Chapman and really nobody liked them in between. So the concern about the game changing

because of the overwhelming nature of power pitchers. So if you change that zone, you disincentivize that pitching style. And then maybe you would disincentivize that training genre that's come out, which is all about 12 months a year of throwing and learning to throw harder and harder. So, you know, weighted balls between showcases. So if you change the incentives,

so right now you're not going to be able to go in and say, kids, don't train this way. There's no way you can do that. And I don't know if that would even be right, but it just wouldn't work. But if you say the game isn't going to be dominated by these hard riding fastballs anymore, and it isn't,

it isn't a game of the power pitcher anymore. It's a game of control and throwing 80% of your effort and nailing your spots, which could be a beautiful way to play the game, it doesn't take power away because you still have that natural ability to find guys like Nolan Ryan and J.R. Richard. They'll still be there. They were power pitchers when I was a child.

And so there's that beauty of saying, just tweak the zone, change that style. And over time, maybe we'll have a healthier pool of pitchers to go with it. And is that what you would recommend as a member of the commission? I would, I would question all of my ideas before making a recommendation of any kind. Your recommendation may be completely ignored. So don't, don't worry. Also the fact, you know, I would first, you know, question the commission. How good is this committee if I'm on it? So things like that would also be more of a meta level discussion to go first.

All right. Well, if, if no one else has any thoughts, we have, I think covered this pretty well. We brought together a pitcher and a pitch effects analyst and a physicist and a couple of writers, which sounds like this set up for the world's worst joke, but I think it, we hopefully raise some, some awareness of an important baseball issue. And thank you all for joining me. Yeah, thank you, Ben. This was fun. All right. So that's it for this week. Please send us emails for next week at

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I will be back, Sam will be back next week with a new show on Monday.