Is it surprising that pitchers are doing so well?

A friend who doesn't follow baseball but has seen the excited reports of pitching gems in the news recently asked me if it is suspicious that very rare pitching accomplishments seem to be happening more often than in the past.

Of course rare doesn't mean they can't happen close together, in fact, they are more likely to.  I can't give any certain answers, but i have some ideas about the background.

Baseball, like cricket before it (and probably like other sports that i don't know about) is a balancing act.  What makes baseball interesting, and, well, even possible is the balance between how hard it is to pitch (and get someone out) and how hard it is to hit (and score). 

And that balance changes over time.  Sometimes it is changed on purpose.  On a number of occasions through the 1800s, 1920s, even as recently as the 1970s, the powers that control baseball have changed the composition of the balls, changed the height of the mound, the distance to the plate, and even (long ago) the number of balls and strikes. All of that was done to intentionally adjust the balance between offense and defense.

And of course, quietly, behind the scenes, the players are always trying to get away with things to adjust that balance.  Just like Lance.  Spitballs, corked bats, amphetamines.   All kinds of things.

It's important to point out that the natural, random cycles of things also have a huge part in these swings between 10 or 15 years of batters dominance and 10 or 15 year so of pitchers' superiority.  The balance goes back and forth.  The 1910s were a famous pitchers' era; when the most successful pitcher of the era was converted to a batter (Babe Ruth) it turned into a batters' era with unprecedented offense.  The swings went back and forth.

In the 1920s a Commissioner's Office was established independent of the players, owners, or  anyone else.  It was required by an act of congress to allow baseball to keep their anti-trust exemption.  If baseball would govern itself, Congress would not allow any rival league to compete with them. The Commissioner was responsible for the integrity of the game, was responsible for finding a balance between the fans, the owners, the players and the media.  Any change had to come through that thoughtful process.  It wasn't always perfect, but it worked well. 

Fast forward to my life, the 1960s were a pitchers era.  Pitchers did very well, records set with 30 win seasons and very low ERAs.  Batters did poorly, batting averages were low, not many offensive records set.  So in the very early 70s the Commissioner lowered the mound a fraction of an inch.  That took away a little bit of the pitchers' advantage.  And they invented the designated hitter, adding a slugger to every AL team.  The result was the booming 70s, a hitters time. 

Nothing OFFICIAL has been done to adjust the balance since the early 1970s. But we can look at what did actually happen.

After 15 years of slugging, it was the pitchers' turn again.  The 1980s were all about pitching and some of the best pitchers of all time had careers running simultaneously.  There are probably many reasons, including randomness, but i can think of three important ones:

• Relief pitching was invented. No longer could batters feast on tired pitchers in the late innings, now they had to face a 95mph fastball in the 9th. That made a HUGE difference.
• The horrible ballparks built in the 1970s.  They had artificial turf, they were HUGE (fences far away), they were fully round (no wind) giant bowls, often indoors.  The surface was concrete and runners tore up their legs.  And they were all the same shape.  Pitchers loved those stadiums. 
• Probably the drugs that were being used in the 80s were more pitching friendly. 

That was followed by an astonishing swing of the balance in favor of the hitters from about 1994 to about 2008. This is more important for answering my friend's question.

Perhaps the most important thing that happened was that in the 1980s baseball was surpassed by first football, and then basketball as America's favorite sport.  Baseball had held that title for 100 years and the rich owners were pretty pissed at being 2nd.   There was a theory amongst the owners that home runs were the only way to attract people.  

What the owners did then was terrible and it was THE REASON i stopped following baseball.  They fired the (un-fireable) commissioner and started running the game themselves, with only their own short term profits in mind.  That was against the law and a lot of people yelled, but Congress did not act.  (grrrr).  Still haven't.  (GRRRR!)

How did that effect the balance?  There are a few big reasons i can think of.  

1. The Commissioner was gone!  The only office looking into performance enhancing drugs went away right at the same time as some amazing high tech drugs (see Cycling, Soccer, Running etcetera) were being developed. 
2. They juiced up the baseball so it would fly farther.  Now i have to tell you that they have never admitted to doing that.  They didn't announce it and they deny it to this day.  But this is not a conspiracy of one, where Mark has this unusual idea either wacky or insightful.  No it's pretty much accepted as a fact by 99% of the baseball establishment.  Watch any baseball game on TV or radio and you will hear them mention it as fact.
3. Collusion, Free Agency and the reserve clause.  In 1974 the federal courts handed down the original decision overturning the reserve clause (which allowed owners to control players, to own them, and terribly underpay them).  But the owners responded with an unwritten agreement to not negotiate with any player from another team, and that collusion had the same effect as the reserve clause.  It was also illegal and they were found guilty by the courts of colluding:  THREE TIMES.  After the first two convictions they just kept doing it.  Finally in the late 1980s after the "Collusion 3" trial, free agency actually went into effect.  Players could sell their services to the highest bidder just like anyone else in the USA.
4. The owners added FOUR more teams to MLB teams in the early 1990s.  That's 100 more players added at the top level and almost 500 more players added to the professional ranks.  Overnight.  One hundred players who weren't good enough last week, were suddenly in the majors.  For some reason that weakened pitching way more than batting.  Even the fairly dense sportscasters doing the games noticed the effects of expansion on pitching, it was that obvious.
5. The owners, of course, control the checkbooks, and with no authority governing them they started paying players more if they hit home runs.  In some cases it was the ONLY criteria they looked at.  Pitchers salaries stayed (comparatively) flat, but batters, especially the one-dimensional sluggers, got paid more and more.  So players who could have chosen to hit singles were motivated to hit doubles and home runs.  The players who hit the ball farther but less often got contracts over players who hit for average.  Up and coming players were encouraged to focus on power.  And worse, there were even BONUSES for power.
6. As always, those power hitters really sucked on defense.  They couldn't find enough places to hide all those three thumbed guys out in the field so there were a lot more errors made and range went way down -- effectively the field got even bigger.  More hits.
7. Cable TV gave the owners more options for selling their product (TV rights) and the prices paid by networks skyrocketed.  (Remember, the owners themselves are now in charge, not a fair and balanced commissioner.)  Then satellite and internet came along giving them even more sales opportunities.  But a great many of those sales opportunities were only 2 minutes long.  It's hard to show a great pitcher throwing a 2-hitter in 90 seconds, but you can show a home run.  That became the product:  the home run.  And the hundreds of clueless new sportscasters who all told us that the players who hit long home runs were the great players -- because they didn't know anything about baseball.
8. Owning a baseball team has been the most profitable thing you could do in the USA for almost 100 years, but the astonishing amount of money that owners make not only went up in 1990s, but more importantly, word got out.  Suddenly the person making the final decisions wasn't a rich baseball guy, it was someone who had never seen a game before.  And they made some really bad decisions.

And there were other things, not directly caused by the owners overthrowing the commissioner that added to the swing to offense:

• As we got into the 1990s a whole class of pitchers (from the 70s & 80s) who were amongst the greatest in history all retired at the same time.  There were others that came up, but that was an extraordinary group that disappeared and they were replaced by rookies.  The average quality of the pitching dropped when they left the game.
• Starting in 1990, the nasty staidia started being replaced by real grass, outdoor, "old fashioned" staidia. At least a dozen of these were built. They were odd shaped, and not fully round, always outdoors, and often smaller.  Better for hitting. 
• There was an unprecedented focus on individual play during the 90s and 00s.  Almost all idea of teamwork fell apart (maybe it was just Reaganism reaching the Majors, i never thought of that!).   Lots of players played their whole carriers sacrificing wins for home runs.  The simple fact that anyone actually thinks Ken Griffy Jr is Hall Of Fame material shows the focus on selfish play rather than team play.
• More high school kids could make it to the majors (100 more slots) and they knew they had a better chance as a slugger than as a pitcher or fielder or singles hitter.  So they taught themselves the slugging style rather than the hitting, running style of play.  And they bulked up.
• There was massive innovation in almost all areas of the game in the 1980s & 90s but coaching did not change at all.  Coaches were still focused almost entirely on colloquial knowledge from the 1940s passed on by older coaches. (They even made a movie about it.)  
• Fantasy League baseball really took off.  This is a hobby where you select a group of players from different teams and follow their progress, adding together INDIVIDUAL statistics to calculate how well your "team" is doing.  This  just increased the focus on the individual over the team.

So, we saw better drugs, juiced up ball, friendlier stadiums, closer fences, bad fielders, money for sluggers, player individualism, bad coaching, bad owners and a draft focused on power.  Is it any wonder that the offense just went wild for 10 or 15 years?  Pitching stats plummeted to record lows while almost every imaginable offensive record was broken by some hyper engineered superman.

Finally things started to change.  Slowly of course.  I see the Red Sox 2004 Championship the beginning of the end of that era. 

• The Sox were the first team to hire a statistician and the first team to hire a general manager who ran the team by the numbers rather than by instinct or mythology. When they won the World Series the rest of the teams woke up.
• In the 2010s we are now watching dozens of major court cases. Legal trials of players who became superhuman using those high tech drugs.  It's almost all batters who are suffering, some pitchers, but mostly hitters.  They were performing at astonishing levels, far above anything ever before, far above anything anyone thought humanly possible. It got so out of hand, so completely unmanaged after 10 or 12 years that the JUSTICE SYSTEM stepped in.  Baseball wasn't watching itself (which it is supposed to do) so the Courts took over.  It's been ugly.  The courts singled many of them out, forced a bunch more into quick retirement, and scared everyone else.  Doping seems to have really dropped a ton. Power is off by something like 45%.
• Since 1994 the owners have added more and more and more games every year, expanding the playoffs to an utterly ridiculous extent..  At first this didn't appear to have much effect, but injuries have gone way up.  The players play more games, there is more wear and tear and the protective drug use is down.  Finally players are easing back a little, trying to not get hurt.
• Pitchers however are doing better. Not only have they finally gotten used to pitching in the new ballparks, but kids have gotten smarter about not pitching too young and there are fewer injuries and burnouts in college and the minors.
• A bunch of players came in from Japan, which had never been effected by the hyper-individualism, and slugging focus, of the 1990s USA.  They brought a more thoughtful, team, winning based attitude instead of the screw the team swing for the fences even if you strike out a bunch idea.
• Scouting has gotten much more extensive, and scientific.
• The greedy owners introduced inter-league play.  The American League is significantly better than the National League.  Always has been.  The NL has sometimes had better pitching, but they've never caught up to the AL in offense.  And on top of just being a better league, the AL has an extra hitter on every team.  Since inter-league play started the AL has just torn the NL apart every time.  It's not close.  Several of those recent pitching gems (including the Mariners' no-hitter my friend asked about) were against National League teams.  Easy pickins.
• I also think that there has been an increase in coverage of things like perfect games and then the addition of the internet, even more access to the information.
• Much of the coverage of baseball in the last 5 to 10 years, just like much of the coverage of everything else, has become simplistic but wildly exaggerated.  Sensationalized.  A 'string' of perfect games is brought to our attention by a sensationalized newscast, but with no analysis, explanation or understanding.  A 'near' perfect game is sensationalized without any mention of how common they are.  It leaves us shocked when it's really quite normal.

So the doping went away, the focus moved off of slugging, pitchers got used to the natural stadiums, coaching got smarter, teamwork came back and a lot of the unbalanced factors from the 90s went away.  We are definitely 3 or 4 years into a pitchers' era.  Actually in my opinion it's not a pitchers' era but a more balanced era, but it's being called a pitchers' era.

Of course, just like absolutely everything else in life, things just cycle.  And these bigger cycles of balance are effected by smaller cycles.  For a few years the high schools will turn out better pitchers, just by chance, then a few years with none.  For a few years maybe weather changes, maybe coaching strategies or maybe just randomness.  Although players HATE it, a lot of sport is  randomness.