Missing Bats: Strikeouts broke baseball. Now a league grapples with how to fix itself (2024)

Missing Bats, a special series this week in The Athletic, explores how baseball’s profound metamorphosis over the last two decades traces back to one simple idea — maximizing strikeouts at all costs — that became an industry-wide obsession. Explore the entire series here.

By Stephen J. Nesbitt, Zack Meisel and Cody Stavenhagen

In the summer of 2008, the New York Yankees took a calculated risk by drafting 17-year-old Gerrit Cole late in the first round. The probability of a first-round prep pitcher panning out is so low that the Yankees had taken only two in the previous 15 drafts. But the Yankees selected Cole because they saw something one of his UCLA coaches would later put into words: “The good Lord put Cole on this earth to be a big-league pitcher.”

Cole didn’t sign with the Yankees out of high school. But the scouting report was accurate. Cole was built to be a workhorse, 6-foot-4 with an easy delivery that kept his right arm healthy. He would have fit in 1910 or 2010, the year the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted him No. 1 overall. And yet as Cole adhered to the organization’s pitching philosophy, prioritizing efficiency and soft contact, the results were only good, not great. “Not the monster we know today,” said Ron Wolforth, founder of Texas Baseball Ranch. Cole struck out less than a batter per inning for the Pirates.

In 2018, the Houston Astros acquired Cole. They believed he was only scraping the surface of his talent. When pitching coach Brent Strom and other Astros brass met with their new acquisition, one official provided Cole with a page of intel about his arsenal and asked, “Have you seen this?”

“They were like, ‘These are some of the fastballs you threw last year,’” Cole said. “‘If you throw this, at the top of the zone, we’ve plugged that pitch into our system, and the league is whiffing 39 percent of the time on that pitch. And you only threw it 17 times in 200 innings last year.’

“I was like, ‘Damn.’”

Cole scrapped his sinker, pumped elevated fastballs and spun breaking balls. He led the majors in strikeout rate the next two seasons.

“You knew exactly what he was going to do,” said Matt Blake, now Cole’s pitching coach in New York, “and you just couldn’t handle it.”

The good Lord made Cole a big leaguer. Missing bats made him an ace. His ascent represented the apotheosis of baseball’s arms race; it also signified the sport’s point of no return.

This week, The Athletic has explored how a pitching uprising spread from the wilds of the internet into baseball’s front offices and onto the field. A theory took root that fundamentally altered the aesthetic of the sport and transformed how players are identified, trained, valued, paid and deployed. That theory — espoused first by a few eccentrics, now embraced by an entire industry — was that a pitcher’s primary pursuit should be swings and misses.

It has taken an unmistakable toll on the sport. Most of the elements of the modern game that have dismayed many a fan in recent years — the issues old-school analysts whinge about on-air — trace back to the strikeout taking over baseball. Arm injuries. Pace of play. Three true outcomes. Sticky stuff. The decline of the starting pitcher.

The industry’s swing-and-miss obsession overhauled how the sport is played, and how those within it behave. Pitchers pursue chase over painting corners. Hitters oblige, selling out for power to counter sharper weapons. Clubs fashion their pitching staffs with a revolving door, cycling through arms that can throw but not pitch. Pitchers train to add velocity and spin because they’re paid more for their stuff than their career stats. Strikeouts abound, action wanes, fans grouse and arms suffer, and the league legislates rule changes in hope of restoring order to a broken game.

All of it comes from a pitching theory put into practice.

What remains is a tug-of-war between the league and those responsible for recording 27 outs each game. One party craves action. The other wants to avoid it. But the ball remains in the hands of the pitchers. They always have dictated the action in baseball. More and more now, they dictate the inaction.

When Theo Epstein began consulting for Major League Baseball in November 2020, the executive who had helped break curses in Boston and Chicago began his career pivot with a public admission: He bore some blame for the existential threats facing the game. The way front offices like his had leveraged data to optimize performance, Epstein said, had unwittingly damaged the sport.

The first symptom Epstein flagged: strikeout rate.

In 2005, 16.4 percent of plate appearances ended in strike three. That number rose each season until 2020, when it peaked at 23.4 percent. “The game was never designed to have nearly a quarter of plate appearances end in a strikeout,” Epstein said later. The strikeout rate in 1968 was 15.8 percent. That was the “Year of the Pitcher,” a moment when the game’s imbalance was so great that the league lowered the mound, shrunk the strike zone and cracked down on doctored baseballs.

Hall of Fame pitcher and broadcaster John Smoltz has watched, and often carped, as data reshapes the profession. The information is valuable for pitchers, he said, but it has come at a cost to the game.

“Pitching velocity and mechanics and training are way ahead of hitting,” Smoltz said. “It’s just too hard to hit that kind of velocity. So hitting had to adjust and go to a one-plane swing — swing for the fences. What ended up happening was the game got the life sucked out of it. It got so slow because of all of this information. That’s why the changes came.”

The league office historically has been slow to change. But in recent years, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has implemented a slew of alterations — including the league’s most drastic rule changes in decades — attempting to tamp down the dominance of pitching and restore the balance of power. There were physical changes, like a short-lived livelier ball, but most were new rules.

A three-batter minimum discouraged bullpen specialization. Setting a 13-pitcher roster limit encouraged starting pitchers to eat more innings. Minor-league option restrictions put restraints on shuttling relievers back and forth to Triple A. Reducing the frequency of position players pitching curbed a strategy to save arms. Bigger bases and pick-off limitations increased stolen bases and run-scoring opportunities. The universal designated hitter erased easy outs. Umpire checks for grip-enhancing substances dissuaded some pitchers from using sticky stuff in search of extra spin. Capping mound visits served as a baby step toward shortening games, a mission later accomplished by a much more radical implementation: the pitch clock.

The timer has been a triumph for the league — cutting average game time by almost 30 minutes and improving pace between pitches — but it has not solved the underlying cause of baseball’s inaction: Pitching still reigns. Hitters are outgunned. The strikeout rate has receded slightly, but remains above 22 percent for the seventh consecutive season. Hits, runs and homers are down in 2024. The league, as a whole, is batting like Bruce Bochy, the backup catcher: .241/.311/.390.

It’s unclear what more the league will consider to return the pitcher-hitter exchange to an equilibrium. Before leaving his consulting role, Epstein said it was worth considering moving the mound back. The league could juice the ball, shrink an already diminished strike zone and further restrict shifting in both the infield and outfield. It could implement any number of rules designed to extend starting pitchers. Last fall, Manfred hinted at further restricting the number of pitchers on a roster. “There are a few numbers smaller than 13,” he said. Roster rules are one lever to pull, but it’ll take more to save the sport from pitching.

One day in Detroit last summer, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer waxed nostalgic about their days as young Tigers pitchers. Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland had pushed them. They went deep into games. They pitched three or more times through the order. If they failed, they kept going.

“Leyland was always like, ‘Go get ‘em,’” Verlander said.

Scherzer recalled that rather than pull him after four innings and 80 pitches, Leyland told him, “Go out there and do your job. You’re pitching deep in the ballgame. You’re going to learn.”

Rarely does that school of thought prevail in today’s major leagues. Out of fear of injuries, teams often protect young pitchers with pitch counts and innings limits. Out of reverence to the data, managers often pull even top pitchers before they face the opposing lineup three times in a game. That sea change has disappointed Scherzer. “We’re so quick to hook the starter to save them and not put them in that situation,” he said. “No. Fail in that situation, learn how to get better. That’s how you develop.”

Scherzer and Verlander sound like old men shaking their fists at a changing game because they are torchbearers for a dying breed: the workhorse starter. The version of the game they grew up in was emotionally and aesthetically pleasing — one man on the mound, the romantic hero with the game in his hands. But modern front offices have come to view that archetype as inefficient, if not detrimental to winning. Last season, MLB hitters had a collective .726 OPS in their first plate appearance against starting pitchers. The number jumped to .748 in the second plate appearance and .784 in the third.

Clubs ask starters for their best stuff, in shorter stints. Starters increasingly adopt a mindset once reserved for relievers: throwing with maximum effort on each pitch. Why ease into an outing that won’t last?

“You might as well limit the damage and get strikeouts,” said Padres starter Dylan Cease.

The starting pitcher is now valued less for volume than pure run-prevention efficiency. Of the 25 highest-paid pitchers in the game, the only ones to throw 200 innings in a season this decade are Cole, Aaron Nola, Zack Wheeler and Chris Bassitt.

Early in his career, Sonny Gray was a bulk starter. For six seasons, he turned in above-average results with low strikeout totals and averaged more than six innings per start. Then Gray reconnected with his college pitching coach, Derek Johnson, in Cincinnati, and his breaking ball usage and strikeout rate surged. Since then, Gray has covered fewer innings but missed bats, muted barrels and mostly stayed healthy. The St. Louis Cardinals lavished him last offseason with a three-year, $75 million deal.

“I feel like a lot of teams … would be like, ‘You know what? We don’t need you for 200 innings,’” Chicago Cubs right-hander Jameson Taillon said. “‘We need you for 110 really, really, really good ones.’”

The starting pitcher’s battle against extinction has raised alarms at the highest levels of the league and the players union. For months, league officials have spoken with pitching experts in all corners of the sport to unearth new solutions to the consequences that the missing-bats movement has spawned.

Verlander and Scherzer will one day have plaques at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. But who will be the next Verlander? The next Scherzer? And by what numbers will we know them?

Sacred pitching milestones have steadily floated out of reach. The doors of the 300-win club have been closed since Randy Johnson entered in 2009, and the only active player in view is Verlander, who at 41 years old has 260 wins. Twenty-win seasons are few. Thirty-win seasons are a fantasy. Even in the strikeout era, no one will approach the innings required to surpass Nolan Ryan’s 383-strikeout season. Verlander and Scherzer are across the 3,000-strikeout threshold, and Clayton Kershaw is on the doorstep, but Cole and Chris Sale are the only others past 2,000.

The average Wins Above Replacement total for Hall of Fame pitchers is 73. Cole is the only active pitcher age 33 or younger with at least 40 WAR. He is the rare starter in this era boasting both stamina and stuff. This spring, in The Athletic’s annual poll of executives and evaluators, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner was deemed the league’s only unanimous ace. Then he suffered an elbow injury. He was not alone: Of the top six active pitchers by WAR, five — Verlander, Scherzer, Kershaw, Cole and Jacob deGrom — started the season on the injured list. Only Sale started healthy, a surprise considering injuries had wrecked his previous five seasons.

At last year’s World Series, as Manfred spoke about the plague of pitcher injuries and the retreat of the starting pitcher, he was asked whether the 30 owners to whom he reports care about the topic.

“I think they care,” he replied, “because it’s relevant to how our fans see the game.”

Their spending seems to suggest otherwise. Owners don’t direct the action on the field, but they employ those who do. They have bankrolled baseball’s arms race, paying for front-office executives who install strikeout factories, for pitching strategists, for the latest pitch-tracking technology, for pitching labs so they don’t fall behind. They hand massive contracts to pitchers who procure whiffs and power hitters who provide them. Spending shapes the sport. How owners feel is reflected in what they buy.

“It’s analytics driving the paycheck,” said a National League pitching coach, “(and) the paycheck driving what we are as an industry.”

Even organizations once skeptical of the missing-bats revolution, those struggling to sketch a blueprint for their own pitching factory, eventually adapted to keep pace in the race to 27 outs. The Pirates are not furnishing 22-year-old strikeout mavens Paul Skenes and Jared Jones with east/west, contact-oriented gameplans, as they once did for Cole.

A few years ago, the Kansas City Royals brain trust regarded the relentless pursuit of swing-and-miss as more of a pitching fad than a pitching fundamental. They tried to ignore it, citing how chasing strikeouts fueled inefficient pitch counts and undesirable innings totals. They prioritized strike one, not strike three. They urged pitchers to induce early, weak contact so they could last six, seven or eight innings. Such principles would be music to the commissioner’s ears, but without sufficient velocity or deception or pinpoint control, they aren’t enough.

The Royals had pinned their hopes on high-round college pitchers in the draft, but the approach proved futile. In the last two years, they fired president Dayton Moore, cleaned out their coaching staff and revamped their scouting department. They assembled a staff stocked with alumni from Cleveland and Tampa Bay, two of baseball’s earliest movers in the missing-bats era, and forged an identity that lands somewhere between strikeout prudes and swing-and-miss dudes. No at-bat outcome has a higher probability of an out than the strikeout, and to get it the Royals want a combination of command and stuff.

“You want to be the house,” Royals pitching coach Brian Sweeney said. “You want the percentages in your favor.”

“If you get guys that can create swing-and-miss,” added GM J.J. Picollo, “it’s a weapon.”

Those teams that had it figured out were the ones with busy October schedules year after year: the Astros, Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Tampa Bay Rays, Cleveland Guardians. The Minnesota Twins were toward the bottom of the league in strikeout rate for much of the 2010s. They led the league in strikeout rate in 2023 and won their first playoff games in 19 years.

The blame for baseball’s current offensive crisis is most often leveled not at the pitchers who caused it, the executives who encouraged it or the league officials who oversaw it. The onus, according to most fans, is on the hitters.

The crux of the criticism stems from the basic directions delivered by Little League coaches. Don’t swing for the fences, just make contact. Go the other way. Choke up with two strikes, shorten your swing and protect the zone. The story of how the strikeout swept the sport is often simplified to the disappearance of those bat-to-ball tenets.

Major-league hitters heard those same instructions as kids. They could try to hit for contact. The first reason contact isn’t king in today’s game is the incentive structure. Most hitters find it’s in their best interest to slug. Power has always paid. As a teammate once told Ralph Kiner, “Home run hitters drive Cadillacs, singles hitters drive Fords.”

The other reason is that it’s incredibly difficult to hit for a high average. For the second year in a row, a hitter flirted with .400 for the first half of the season — first Luis Arraez, and now Steven Kwan, but they are notable exceptions, not paint-by-numbers templates to follow. Tony Gwynn was Tony Gwynn for a reason. A middling minor leaguer revamping his hitting approach to give his career a chance will find work far easier optimizing their swing for power than mimicking contact-hitting greats. Doing damage opens doors.

It’s easy to condemn the launch-angle revolution, as George Brett did this week, but it’s also crucial to contextualize that swing changes occurred as an answer to the pitching revolution of the past two decades. Hitting big-league pitching has never been more difficult. Fastballs fly faster and are relied upon less — now constituting less than half of all pitches thrown — as pitchers change speeds with high-spin breaking balls. Pitching strategy has shifted drastically. Building a bullpen of fire breathers to squash action in leverage situations has become as important as finding a starting five. From 2000 to 2015, 66 percent of innings were thrown by starters. That number has been below 60 percent since 2018.

As the middle innings wear on, the manager summons that hoss who bursts through the bullpen doors to heave the stuff that is sure to miss bats.

Relievers not only have more gas than starters, they boast significantly more spin. The leaguewide spin rate declined after MLB began enforcing sticky-stuff inspections in 2021, but it has since risen back to a similar level. Relievers are imparting more spin on the baseball than ever, meaning hitters have to gear up for both high heat and 20-inch sweepers cultivated in a lab.

Those trends are as disheartening to league officials as they are to hitters. The slew of rule changes have seemingly had only a small effect on loosening pitchers’ grip on the game. Despite restricting infield shifts, the league’s batting average on balls in play (.288) is lower than it’s been in 30 years. Batting average (.242) and on-base percentage (.311) haven’t been lower since 1968. For eight straight seasons, at least a third of plays have resulted in one of the three true outcomes — strikeout, walk, homer. What more can the league do? Put a governor on velocity? Ban sweepers?

If rules or the natural consequences of arm injuries don’t reverse pitching trends, perhaps the league can change clubs’ value systems. The sport is predicated on chance; efficiency-minded executives are obsessed with removing it. The modern baseball front office has rigged the machine to snuff chance from the system, so the batter-pitcher conflict is driven by the pursuit of two certain outcomes: If you’re a pitcher, don’t let them hit the ball. If you’re a hitter, hit the ball where they can’t catch it. What falls in between, according to run value matrices, is subject to chance.

Still, there are some who believe the game is righting itself.

Several of the game’s rising teams are built around old-school offensive approaches, taking advantage of MLB’s rule changes to prioritize contact, speed and defense. The Royals and Guardians have lineups populated less by big-name sluggers and more by contact-oriented hitters — Kwan being the leading example — who make for difficult outs and can reach base more frequently without infield shifts. “When you don’t have a roster full of boppers,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said, “you have to do little things to put pressure on the other team to create chaos.” The Milwaukee Brewers are wreaking havoc on the basepaths.

“As a fan, you don’t want to come to the game and just watch guys get mowed down for nine straight innings,” Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich said. “At the same time, I think it’s still possible — that you can still play offense. It just might not be how it used to be.”

Others interviewed for this series predicted there would be more small ball in the next decade than in the last. Just as the “Moneyball” Oakland Athletics saw on-base percentage as a better, cheaper way to build a ballclub, others may begin to chase contact and speed as inefficiencies in the major-league market. Some surmised that while hitting advancements have lagged far behind pitchers, new tech will arrive. Statcast’s bat-tracking data will show hitters distinct swing profiles that work in today’s game, like the incredibly short, compact swings of Arraez and Kwan. There now exist pitching machines that simulate the velocity and spin of every major-league pitcher’s arsenal. Some speculated that clubs would begin reallocating resources from power pitchers to those with less violent deliveries and lower perceived injury risk, and to hitters who can consistently square them up.

Two aspects will never change: That each play in baseball begins with a confrontation between a pitcher and a hitter, and that the pitcher initiates the action. “There are 50,000 people in the Bronx,” former Yankees starter CC Sabathia once said, “and that s— don’t start until I’m ready.” He dictates what follows on his terms. The hitting profession is, by nature, reactive. If a pitcher chooses to not throw a hittable pitch, not even Barry Bonds can take him deep. Even as the league has intervened to keep it a fair fight, pitchers have firmly seized the upper hand. As hitters stand in against a maelstrom of triple-digits fastballs and knee-buckling breaking balls, they’re forced to make a logical choice about how to proceed. More often than not, the calculus leads them to fight fire with fire.

This spring, Arizona Diamondbacks pitching coach Brent Strom — the man who saw the value of the elevated fastball before almost everyone else and helped transform pitchers such as Cole into strikeout machines — walked past a Diamondbacks’ batting cage and chuckled at the paradox.

“I just walked out and saw hitting coaches working on the high tee, trying to hit the high fastball,” he said. “So we’re gonna have to frickin’ readjust.”

—With reports from The Athletic’s Andy McCullough

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Mike Carlson / MLB Photos via Getty Images, Luke Hales / Getty Images)