What happened to baseball’s .300 hitter?

PHILADELPHIA — With hitters struggling, pitchers dominating, and officials wondering how to juice offensive production back to fan-pleasing levels, Major League Baseball was in crisis.

It was 1968, the so-called “year of the pitcher.” Across both the National and American Leagues, offense was at or near a record low in all sorts of measures: runs, hits, home runs, runners reaching base, slugging percentage, you name it.

In all of baseball that year, only six hitters managed a batting average of .300 or higher, an all-time low. In the American League, Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski won the batting crown with an average of just .301, a mark that still stands as the lowest ever to win a batting title.

Now, nearly six decades later, what’s old is new again: A batting average crisis is back.

You’d think today’s batters have more advantages than ever: They train year-round. They have the advice of well-staffed analytics departments on their swing and at-bat strategy. They can practice before each game on modern pitching machines capable of mimicking the arsenal of that day’s opposing pitcher.

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Yet, incredibly, none of that has been enough.

This year, the leaguewide batting average has slumped to .246. And the number of .300 hitters — a club whose size peaked at 55 in 1999 — is at risk of tying, if not breaking, 1968’s record low. As of Thursday, there were eight such hitters in the major leagues.

“It’s the toughest thing in all of sports to do, and it’s becoming tougher,” said Kevin Long, who has won two World Series as a hitting coach and now works for the Philadelphia Phillies, where shortstop Trea Turner appears poised to win the National League batting title with an average of just .305. “It’s hard to believe that this is where we’re at in our game.”

It’s the pitching

Hitters and coaches alike point to one dominant factor: Pitching is better than ever.

Pitchers today throw faster, and their pitches have more movement than ever. Starting pitchers are pulled from the game sooner — almost an entire inning earlier, on average, than a decade ago — because every team has a bullpen staffed with relievers who can throw in the high 90s, if not triple digits. Batters were more successful as they saw the same pitcher three or four times in the same game. Now, batters often see a starter only twice before someone from the bullpen.

“You used to want to get to the bullpen. I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case anymore, because you get to these bullpen arms, they’re all throwing 97 to 102,” said Long.

Pitchers have benefited from the introduction of sophisticated pitch tracking machines around ten years ago, and the advanced data they produced about pitches — like their spin rate and direction, and the precise angle and distance of the ball’s movement — have helped pitchers refine their arsenal.

Defense has also gained an edge, batters said. Fielders can study video of opponents broken down by pitch type and velocity. Analytics departments prepare cheat sheets for each fielder to carry with them during the game that advise on where to position themselves for each batter — and sometimes, for each pitch.

“For someone like me, I’ve had seven years worth of data for these guys to dig through,” said Mike Yastrzemski, Carl’s grandson and an outfielder for the Kansas City Royals (current batting average .228). “There’s a lot of information that’s out there for them that creates a very tough matchup for any hitter, no matter how good you are.”

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Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader, who made his MLB debut in 2017, says the rapid advances have forced hitters to play catch-up in their preparation and approach at the plate.

“It’s different every single day. It’s different every single at-bat. And, quite frankly, it’s different pitch to pitch,” said Bader, whose efforts this season have resulted in a career-high batting average of .283, which would rank 20th in the majors had he not missed time due to injury. “I think that’s what makes the art of hitting something that really is an art.”

Home runs are up, and strikeouts too

Hitting, too, has changed. More teams and players have come to prioritize hitting for power, rather than hitting for contact or for average.

The result is that, across the league, the rate of home runs per plate appearance has climbed by 50% or more over the past 50 years. And even as the batting average has declined, the number of runs scored per game, at 4.47, is still far higher than the 1968 low of 3.42. Batters today are hitting home runs in 3.1% of their times at the plate, compared to just 1.7% in 1968.

There are drawbacks to the power approach. Most visible are the strikeouts: Strikeout rates have climbed steadily since the mid-2000s. Hitters who loft the ball in an effort to hit it out of the park also hit more fly outs. And in the mid-2010s, as home run rates took off, the rates of other hits — especially singles — began to sag.

Still, faced with dominant starting pitchers like Pittsburgh’s Paul Skenes or Detroit’s Tarik Skubal, teams have largely decided that the scoring benefits are worth the cost of admission.

“If you think you’re going to go out there off of Tarik Skubal and put three or four hits together in an inning, good luck,” said Michael Massey, the Royals’ second baseman, currently batting .219. “What teams and what players have come to is they’ve said, ‘Well, guys have gotten so good that the reality is when he makes a mistake — because he doesn’t make many of them — we need to capitalize.'”

What could be next? 

Baseball has a long history of tweaking the rules to put a thumb on the scale whenever pitchers or batters have gained too much of an upper hand.

After 1968, league officials decided something must be done. That winter, officials voted to lower the height of the pitcher’s mound by a third, from 15 inches to 10, and to shrink the size of the strike zone by lowering the top of the zone from a batter’s shoulders to his armpits.

The two changes had an immediate effect, along with the expansion of the league to include four new teams, which resulted in some pitchers who had previously been minor league-quality players coming to the majors to fill out four additional rosters.

No changes that dramatic are on the horizon today. A 2023 decision to limit defensive shifts resulted in a modest bump for batters that season, especially left-handed hitters, but batting averages have slipped back down since.

The difference: runs. In 1968, teams struggled to score runs as batters struggled to hit. Today, in spite of the lower batting averages, the number of runs scored per game, at 4.47, is still far higher than the 1968 low of 3.42.