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Go ahead and contract Tampa Bay. Other than them, who would you roll back that is every year bad and horribly attended?
April 2, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor, NYTimes.com
What Really Ruined Baseball
By J. C. BRADBURY
Atlanta
WITH an off-season that included Mark McGwire’s rejection by Hall of Fame voters, Barry Bonds’s continuing problems and accusations that Gary Matthews Jr. of the Angels had obtained human growth hormones, it’s hard not to think about the influence of performance-enhancing drugs this opening day.
The news media have focused on steroids because of the way the game has changed over the last decade, particularly the frequency with which batters now hit home runs. As Bob Costas said a year ago, the steroid era “didn’t evolve; it erupted,” adding, “You had players who were already in the big leagues in the late ’80s and early ’90s who never approached what they did from the mid 90s on. And that’s what made it so su ious.”
Baseball commentators have been quick to blame performance-enhancing drugs. And while baseball has changed, the reason for that may be more innocent. In the two years since baseball ins uted mandatory steroid testing with suspensions, the rate at which players hit home runs has stayed roughly the same. Additionally, more than half the major leaguers who have failed drug tests under this new regime are pitchers — the guys who serve up, not hit, the home runs.
The origin of the modern home run era can in fact be traced to the expansion of the league. In the 1990s, Major League Baseball grew to 30 teams from 26 — the Marlins and the Rockies joined in 1993, the Devil Rays and Diamondbacks in 1998. The influx of inferior talent filling those new roster spots fundamentally altered the compe ive environment: it allowed elite players, especially hitters, to excel.
The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, an avid baseball fan, hypothesized that in compe ive environments, as the variance of the quality of participants shrinks, opportunities for great performances diminish. For most of its history, the major leagues were progressively populated by better and better baseball players — through natural population growth, racial integration and immigration — which meant that opportunities for achievements like hitting .400 were decreasing. As superior players replaced the weakest ones, even the very best had fewer chances at turning in remarkable performances.
Expansion abruptly reversed the trend; today, the variance in quality of major league pitchers, based on E.R.A., is at an all-time high. By letting in the riffraff for baseball’s elite to exploit, expansion increased the likelihood of great achievements. Without even bringing steroids into the discussion, it is no surprise that some already fine hitters performed even better after the early 1990s.
The same phenomenon has occurred for ace pitchers, who faced more unseasoned batters. Since 1993, pitchers have ac ulated 300 strikeouts in a season 11 times. In the 15 years preceding expansion it happened only four times. Couldn’t steroid use by elite pitchers explain this? Possibly. But talent dilution, not drugs, lies behind another curious and corresponding batting statistic: the rise in hit batters. From the beginning of the 20th century until 1993, nine batters were hit by a pitch at least 25 times in a season. Since that pivotal year it has happened 13 times. How would steroids cause more hit batters? It could be “roid rage,” but it’s more likely inferior pitchers, missing the strike zone way inside.
In the expansion era, home runs per game are up 30 percent over the previous decade, strikeouts 15 percent and hit batters a whopping 70 percent. All are likely the result of expansion’s dilution of pitching talent.
To many baseball fans the game has been ruined — hallowed records toppled, managers playing less small ball as they wait for that three-run homer. But the blame shouldn’t be placed on pills, needles and balms. The true culprit is expansion.
J. C. Bradbury, an economist and associate professor at Kennesaw State University, runs the Web site Sabernomics and is the author of “The Baseball Economist.”
Go ahead and contract Tampa Bay. Other than them, who would you roll back that is every year bad and horribly attended?
Take the team with the worst record each season and kill the franchise.
Do that for about 10 years, 5 years minimum, to contract the NBA and MLB to match the quan y of talent.
so if the Cardinals had the worst record, due to Pujols Carpenter Rolen, pretty much all their good players are hurt, in one year, youd contract em.
More unmitigated genius.
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