Return of the deadball era?

I think 22 games is too early to point fingers at individual players, so I dug into some basic, retrospective team batting stats to see if something stands out to explain how offensive the offense has been. I also compared the 2021 Sox to the 2022 edition because one huge difference that sticks out to me between those teams is that the 2021 Sox were the team that imposed heartbreaking losses on other teams (especially the MFYs), not the team that absorbed them, like the 2022 Sox. Also the 2022 lineup is essentially the same as the 2022 lineup, save for replacing Marwin with Story and Renfroe with JBJ.

Here's a table to summarize and perhaps point to one place where the 2022 Sox have been really bad:



Going into this, I was pretty sure that a big problem with 2022 was going to be RISP, as this team seems particularly unclutch. I get that RISP is not a predictive stat, it's a retrospective stat. But I'm just trying to diagnose the problem, not predict what will happen in the next 22 games, and retrospective stats can do that. The 2022 team's RISP numbers are pretty much the same as their overall numbers, so the stats say that the team as a whole is neither clutch nor unclutch. B-Ref's "leverage" breakdown doesn't really reveal anything either. But look at the two-out RISP -- it's way down, right? Unclutch! Well maybe, but that stat is skewed by the strangest number on the whole board: Hitting with two outs.

Is hitting with two outs even a thing? Why should it be? Do hitters do anything differently with two outs compared to with no outs or one out? Do pitchers do anything different to them? Is there such a thing as a "two out approach"? You're more likely to have runners on base with two outs but the full 2021 seasons stats would suggest that hitting numbers are more or less the same regardless of how many outs there are (gotta like the 2021 two-out RISP numbers, though).

So MLB as the big daddy of hitting coaches... "incentivizing" is one of those words loved by boardroom denizens. I'm a little less excited about seeing it in action at the plate.

Ownership's apparent goal of rationalizing all aspects of the game is another touchstone for the business class. If screwing with the baseball year after year is part of that, they'll make the people who brought us WAR and it's variants happy. That will be the only way to actually compare players across seasons. It certainly won't be the record books. Those will have been cooked - another boardroom winner.

I can totally see that....One interesting question for me is are the "dead balls" just returning to the same condition they were prior to the "juiced ball" or is it deadened even further??

Assuming that there are no future ball adjustments coming, I believe teams will begin to prioritize some undervalued skills such as batting average, base running, and defense. Currently most teams have a stockpile of "3 Outcome" players which is making the current state pretty painful when the dead ball reduces to "2 Outcomes".

The new shift rule coming in 2023 will reward gap-to-gap hitters and make it harder to hide players who can't field their positions. This should make defensive skills more valuable.

Teams that respond to this sooner rather than later will be the most successful in the near term. Of course everything changes if Manfred keeps monkeying around with the ball and doesn't tell anyone. He can't continue to keep plans to himself and expect everyone to guess.

I really don't see what's wrong with changing the balls to engineer a more aesthetically pleasing style of play. I'm all for that. I just don't know why there needs to be this weird lack of transparency about it.

Agreed....my only issue is, don't play with it inning to inning or even game to game. Make the change, Let everyone know and move forward.

You can’t tell me Manfred isn’t a plant from one of the other sports leagues trying to kill baseball

Yes. We are in the deadball era



streamable.com/gmopb4