Baseball by the Numbers

There is no sport that has been driven by statistics longer than baseball.

When I grew up I poured over the batting averages and ERA's of every major leaguer when they were published in the Sunday paper.

Of course, the basic statistics used in the 1960's like batting average, RBI's, ERA and strikeouts have been supplemented with a range of more sophisticated stats. OBP, OPS, WAR, RF, dWAR, WHIP, SV, BLSV.

If you know what these are, you are a real baseball fan. You also probably read Moneyball by Michael Lewis where Lewis paid homage to the new era of statistics and the baseball men who were managing their team with them.

Despite all of the statistic scrutiny today, baseball still simply remains as it has been since professional baseball first began in 1869 in Cincinnati. The batter has to hit the ball where it cannot be caught. The pitcher has to throw the ball over the plate so it can't be hit. The team with the most runs after nine innings wins.

That is why I found the following seven baseball charts that date back to 1871 to be quite interesting in documenting the evolution of the game.

Let's look at offense first. The blue line represents the overall average of all players. The black dots represent each individual player. Stand out performances are shown with the player's name.

The overall batting average in MLB has not fluctuated much in 150 years.

However, a lot more home runs are hit.

Stolen bases were much more prevalent in the late 1800's than they are today.

A few charts on pitching.

ERA's have been heading down since 2000 but are still higher than in most of MLB history.

Strike outs are way up.

Complete games are way down. In fact, they are almost non-existent anymore.

The one thing that is really up is the size of the players. You don't often see major league players that are not at least 6 feet tall anymore. Average weight is about 210 pounds. Look at how pronounced the upward trend in weight has been just since 1980. This has to be to due to increased use of strength and weight training programs for athletes.

I will conclude with one more baseball statistic that I did not know is being tracked. It is the number of pop-outs that a batter has. A pop-out is considered a pop fly that is caught by the other team within 140 feet of home plate.

I recently came across the fact that Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds had popped out just 7 times since 2010. To put that in context, the average major league batter would have popped out 127 times over that period.

Credit: @MLBRandomStats
Stats as of July 19, 2018

To put that in additional perspective, Votto's pop-out percentage is one-sixth that of the next closest MLB batter over the last three years!

It is a remarkable baseball stat. It is also helps to explain why Votto has the highest OBP (on-base percentage) of any active major leaguer today. In fact, Votto's career OBP is the 10th best in the history of baseball. Better than Mantle, Musial, Mize, Ott, Greenberg, DiMaggio and almost every other Hall of Famer (save 10) that you can think of.

If you want to see a rare baseball moment, here is Votto popping out for the only time he did during 2017.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkVZ2bjQjLU (if your browser does not bring up the video)

If we could only track that statistic back to 1871. I would like to see where Votto stacks up.