Uncle Scoopy's Ballpark: What Happened to the Offense?

Uncle Scoopy's Ballpark: What Happened to the Offense?

Baseball started playing with the modern pitching distance in 1893, and pitching has changed significantly since those days, when starting pitchers were considered total wimps if they didn't pitch a complete game, and the star pitchers might start almost fifty games. Cy Young pitched 7,356 innings in his career. I don't think that one will be broken. If you pitch 200 innings every year from age 25 to age 60, you still won't make it. When he was in his mid-twenties, ol' Cy would get about 45 starts and some relief duty, tossing more than 400 innings in the process.

But in all that time only two things have really changed in offenses: (1) while the total number of extra base hits has stayed roughly constant, triples have gradually metamorphosed into home runs; (2) strikeouts just keep climbing, era after era, year after year, and the resulting decline in the number balls in play has substantially reduced the number of singles.