By Thom Henninger
When Diamondbacks right-hander Edwin Jackson tossed a no-hitter against the Rays last Friday, it was the 25th 1-0 victory in the major leagues this season. And it was at least the fourth no-no of the first half.
You have to go back to 1992 for the last time there were as many 1-0 games through the same date as Jackson’s eight-walk masterpiece. That’s going back to the year prior to the first of two rounds of expansion, which bumped up scoring and ERAs for the next decade.
The 1-0 games and the no-hitters are telling. Run production has taken a downturn in the first half of the 2010 season. The average run total per game is 4.46, the lowest since 1992. It’s an average that has trended downward since 2006, dropping by more than half a run over these years.
This spring wouldn’t be the first time in recent memory that pitchers seemed to have had the upper hand early in a new season. Once the weather heats up and the ball starts carrying more, hitters tend to neutralize any advantage the pitchers might have had. A key difference in 2010, however, is that it was a warmer than average spring across much of the country.
It may be that the game is trending toward pitchers after a hitter-dominated era that took root during 1990s expansion, also a time when a lot of new hitter-friendly parks opened in big league cities.
The game’s runs-per-game average was in the low fours through the late1980s, surged in the early years of the Colorado and Florida franchises, and peaked at 5.04 runs a game in 1996, in their fourth year of play. Then the runs dropped off for two seasons before reaching an era-high 5.14 a game in 2000, the third year for the new Arizona and Tampa Bay clubs.
Runs per game stayed in the high fours for most of the 2000s, before dropping off to 4.65 in 2007 and 4.61 in 2008. Now it’s 4.46 a game, and the major league-wide ERA of 4.17 is the closest it’s been to 4.00 since pitchers posted a 3.74 mark in the last pre-expansion year of ’92.
We’ll learn over the summer whether it was just another spring in which pitchers had the early advantage. Or that maybe the pendulum has swung toward a 21st-century version of a pitcher’s era. The small ballparks in today’s game may rule out a repeat of 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, but today’s hurlers seem to have made adjustments to their more intimate surroundings. They may be overcoming all attempts by MLB executives to boost the number of runs crossing the plate.
One last thought on this theme. There are 20 ERA qualifiers with marks lower than 3.00 heading into July. Eleven of those 20 pitchers have been born since 1984 and are 26 years old or younger. They include the best pitcher in the game this season, Colorado’s Ubaldo Jimenez, as well Florida’s Josh Johnson, Jon Lester of the Red Sox, the Rays’ David Price, Milwaukee’s Yovani Gallardo, the Giants’ Matt Cain, and rookies Jaime Garcia of the Cardinals and Mike Leake of the Reds.
Other young pitchers near the top of the ERA leader board, but with ERAs higher than 3.00, include Cain’s teammate and two-time Cy Young winner, Tim Lincecum, plus Seattle’s Felix Hernandez, the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, Phil Hughes of the Yankees, the Reds’ Johnny Cueto and John Danks of the White Sox. Then there’s Stephen Strasburg and a host of other pitching prospects settling into big league jobs.
The top young hurlers mentioned here are just beginning to enter their prime. They are likely to play a key role if, in fact, pitchers are gaining an edge that is changing the game.
