More from The Athletic on the game itself:
BATTING AVERAGE: League average was .244, lowest since 1968.
SINGLES: The average team hit just 5.1 singles per game, almost identical to last year, but producing the fewest total singles in a season since the inception of the 162-game schedule.
STEALS: The average team stole a mere 0.45 bases per game, lowest rate since 1967. But meanwhile, the stolen-base success rate, of 75.5 percent, was actually the best ever, proving that for data-driven teams, base-stealing is now basically a math equation.
DOUBLE PLAYS: The pitcher’s best friend isn’t as loyal as it used to be. The average team grounded into only 0.69 double plays per game, the lowest rate since this has been calculated.
HIT BATTERS: Welcome to the first season in history with more than 2,000 batters getting hit by a pitch. The total is a record, although the rate per game was slightly higher last year.
BABIP: The batting average on balls in play was only .292, barely below last year and the lowest since 1992 (the year before offense exploded in the PED era). Two words: Shifts work!
ERRORS: The average team made only 0.54 errors per game. But we regret to report that is not a tribute to leatherwork. Like the DP rate, it’s a reminder merely that the ball is never in play anymore. All right, not never. But, despite that dip in the Three True Outcomes, not nearly enough.
So what does it all mean? It’s a reminder that too many action plays are disappearing from this sport. And that’s a problem.
“It’s just a symptom of how the game has changed, how the game has moved in the direction of power and strikeouts,” said one AL exec. “When you’re seeing singles, hits on balls in play, stolen bases, all these things, going by the wayside, it’s telling us that nothing that’s been done around the edges has made an impact the way we thought it would.”
So what’s the moral of that story? A lot of traditional baseball fans don’t want to hear this. But here’s the unvarnished truth:
“Without some structural shift — without some significant change to the rules — I don’t see this reversing course,” the same exec aid. “We have to incentivize changing the way the game is played, because it’s just not happening organically.”
My suggestion: Make the baseball itself less aerodynamic. Make it less advantageous to hit balls in the air.