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Baseball has never looked quite like it does now, for better and for worse. Defenders are getting involved in play less than ever and stolen bases are at a 45-year low, but on the other hand, the game is populated by beastlike men capable of spectacular feats of power. And the sport is only moving further toward that extreme.
[...]
The phrase “three true outcomes” was coined in 2000 by then–Baseball Prospectus writer (now Ringer contributor) Rany Jazayerli. “Together, the Three True Outcomes distill the game to its essence,” he wrote, “the battle of pitcher against hitter, free from the distractions of the defense, the distortion of foot speed or the corruption of managerial tactics like the bunt and his wicked brother, the hit-and-run.”
[...]
Not only are the athletes getting better, so are the people recruiting and training them. In Beltrán’s lifetime, the cutting edge of baseball research has gone from a stack of index cards in Earl Weaver’s office to the musings of amateur statisticians and theorists to all 30 teams being run by business school types backed by an army of empiricists. The professionalization of the front office has been the only change in baseball over the past 20 years more marked than the increasing strikeout rate.
[...]
Modern coaches and executives are awash in data and obsessive about teaching players what they know works. Mets pitchers learn the Warthen Slider, named for pitching coach Dan Warthen, while Yankees and Dodgers farmhands get taught a series of mechanical tweaks that add fastball velocity.
[...]
Even hitters without Gallo’s strength benefit from two running stories this year: the juiced ball and the swing-plane revolution. This home run revolution is unlike the steroid era in that nobody’s hitting 60 home runs a year, but everyone’s hitting 20.
[...]
Jazayerli’s original TTO article invoked Rob Deer, who’s the patron saint of the all-or-nothing hitting approach for people my parents’ age. Deer was a career .220/.324/.442 hitter with a TTO% of 49.1, which would rank eighth in baseball in 2017. This season, Gallo’s hitting .197/.312/.512, and while Deer was a bad defensive right fielder, Gallo’s within a couple of runs of average at third base, despite being two inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than Deer.
[...]
For example, 20 years ago the all-time single-season record for strikeout rate by a reliever was 38.5 percent, set by Rob Dibble in 1992. Since 1998, that record’s been broken five times by four different pitchers, and from 1998 to 2016 there were 31 different reliever seasons with a K% of 38.5 or better. This year, six different relievers with at least 25 appearances are on pace to either tie or beat Dibble’s 1992 mark.
[...]
When a period of baseball’s history has been defined by its style of play, it’s usually because that era is particularly low-scoring (the pre-1920 dead-ball era) or high-scoring (the steroid era). But the baseball of 2017 is neither — the average team is scoring 4.66 runs per game, the 64th-highest mark in the 147 years for which Baseball Reference has data.
What characterizes this era is that fielders play less of a role than ever. With the league-wide TTO rate at 33.4 percent, a third of at-bats involve only the catcher, hitter, and pitcher; between seven and 10 other guys (depending on how many men are on base) are left just standing around. For six batters (Gallo, Judge, Sanó, Matt Davidson, Khris Davis, and Trevor Story) and five relief pitchers (Dellin Betances, Corey Knebel, Craig Kimbrel, Carl Edwards Jr., and José LeClerc), it’s a 50/50 proposition or better that the defense will not be needed.
https://theringer.com/inefficiency-...-aaron-judge-three-true-outcomes-855405c6d5b7
[...]
The phrase “three true outcomes” was coined in 2000 by then–Baseball Prospectus writer (now Ringer contributor) Rany Jazayerli. “Together, the Three True Outcomes distill the game to its essence,” he wrote, “the battle of pitcher against hitter, free from the distractions of the defense, the distortion of foot speed or the corruption of managerial tactics like the bunt and his wicked brother, the hit-and-run.”
[...]
Not only are the athletes getting better, so are the people recruiting and training them. In Beltrán’s lifetime, the cutting edge of baseball research has gone from a stack of index cards in Earl Weaver’s office to the musings of amateur statisticians and theorists to all 30 teams being run by business school types backed by an army of empiricists. The professionalization of the front office has been the only change in baseball over the past 20 years more marked than the increasing strikeout rate.
[...]
Modern coaches and executives are awash in data and obsessive about teaching players what they know works. Mets pitchers learn the Warthen Slider, named for pitching coach Dan Warthen, while Yankees and Dodgers farmhands get taught a series of mechanical tweaks that add fastball velocity.
[...]
Even hitters without Gallo’s strength benefit from two running stories this year: the juiced ball and the swing-plane revolution. This home run revolution is unlike the steroid era in that nobody’s hitting 60 home runs a year, but everyone’s hitting 20.
[...]
Jazayerli’s original TTO article invoked Rob Deer, who’s the patron saint of the all-or-nothing hitting approach for people my parents’ age. Deer was a career .220/.324/.442 hitter with a TTO% of 49.1, which would rank eighth in baseball in 2017. This season, Gallo’s hitting .197/.312/.512, and while Deer was a bad defensive right fielder, Gallo’s within a couple of runs of average at third base, despite being two inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than Deer.
[...]
For example, 20 years ago the all-time single-season record for strikeout rate by a reliever was 38.5 percent, set by Rob Dibble in 1992. Since 1998, that record’s been broken five times by four different pitchers, and from 1998 to 2016 there were 31 different reliever seasons with a K% of 38.5 or better. This year, six different relievers with at least 25 appearances are on pace to either tie or beat Dibble’s 1992 mark.
[...]
When a period of baseball’s history has been defined by its style of play, it’s usually because that era is particularly low-scoring (the pre-1920 dead-ball era) or high-scoring (the steroid era). But the baseball of 2017 is neither — the average team is scoring 4.66 runs per game, the 64th-highest mark in the 147 years for which Baseball Reference has data.
What characterizes this era is that fielders play less of a role than ever. With the league-wide TTO rate at 33.4 percent, a third of at-bats involve only the catcher, hitter, and pitcher; between seven and 10 other guys (depending on how many men are on base) are left just standing around. For six batters (Gallo, Judge, Sanó, Matt Davidson, Khris Davis, and Trevor Story) and five relief pitchers (Dellin Betances, Corey Knebel, Craig Kimbrel, Carl Edwards Jr., and José LeClerc), it’s a 50/50 proposition or better that the defense will not be needed.
https://theringer.com/inefficiency-...-aaron-judge-three-true-outcomes-855405c6d5b7
