The MLB’s Historic Imbalance Problem
The payroll imbalance between the Dodgers and everyone else, and between big- and small-market franchises, is setting up an owner-union impasse that might kill the 2027 baseball season. Owners are demanding a salary cap; the players union won’t budge.
But MLB has another imbalance problem, a generational offensive-defense crisis.
In 2022, Major League Baseball instituted the most far-reaching rules changes in well over a century – the pitch clock, defensive-shift ban, pickoff limits, enlarged (“pizza box”) bases, extra-inning “ghost runners.” The game had become too dull even for the most devoted fan. Does anyone love baseball enough to endure four-hour games with nothing but home runs, strike outs, and walks? (Known as the “three true outcomes” [TTO], when the ball is not put into play.)
Three seasons of the new regime have produced mixed results. Games are shorter, but the TTO problem remains, as does the historically notable imbalance between offense and defense. This is the latest chapter in the long history of baseball, where offense and defense vie to balance each other like the universal yin and yang. TTO threatened to end defense altogether, or to reduce it to pitching.
Games are undoubtedly shorter. The average MLB game never exceeded two hours until 1934. The first season to average over three hours was 1990, and it reached a peak of 3 hours, ten minutes in 2021. It has fallen precipitously to 2:38 in 2024. The pitch clock is probably most responsible for this, and even arch-traditionalist baseball pundits admit that it has not fundamentally altered the nature of the game. (After all, baseball was originally “timed” by the setting of the sun, and it remains untimed in that each team gets its innings. Only the time between pitches, not the game itself, is now timed.) Increasing the size of the bases, which reduced the distance between the bases, certainly added speed to the game. The number of bases stolen jumped by fifty percent from 2022 to 2023.
But many noted that it is not the length of the game, but its pace – the sequence of events that compose the game – that plagues it.
The TTO problem remains. One-third of plate appearances produced a home run, walk, or strikeout in 2022, and that percentage actually increased to 34% last season. In the deadest season of the defense-dominant “dead-ball era,” 1908, the TTO rate was 16%. At the height of the new free-swinging live-ball era, 1930, it was virtually unchanged. It crept up to 25% when pitching became predominant in 1968 (the “second dead-ball era”), and fell back closer to 20% within a decade. It reached almost 30% by 2000.
This is due to the rise of 100 mph fastballs, specialized relief pitching, and batters seeking home runs above all else. But clearly the rise of superpower pitching has overmatched superpower hitting. The new rules have not addressed the fundamental imbalance between them.
We’ve been here before. The history of baseball is basically the history of its rules, which have always sought to balance offense and defense. But the unique nature – the genius – of baseball is that it radically separates offense and defense but also makes it hard to distinguish offense and defense. Baseball is not like the “rectangle sports” which involve moving the ball or puck or disc from one end of the rectangle to the other. In baseball, you don’t score with the ball. The offense usually wants the ball to be as far away as possible. Baseball has no “turnovers.”
Offense and defense appear to be very distinct. But someone who’d never seen the game before could well wonder, looking at a pitcher, throwing a 100-mph ball, and a batter trying to fend it off, which was on offense. The colossal number of discrete events is what makes baseball so statistical, and made possible the “analytics revolution” that some say has been killing the game.
In the Civil War-era days of “base-ball,” the pitcher’s only job was to put the ball in play. He had to pitch – not throw – underhand, and batters could ask for pitches to be high or low. Pitchers could get batters out, but traditionalists thought that this was bad form (“not cricket,” per one of baseball’s ancestors). There was no good pitching, just bad batting.
In the late 19th century, the rules evolved to make the game more dynamic, and pitching came into its own – overhand delivery, “trick pitches,” called strikes on overly-particular batters. In 1893, to boost offense, MLB (then called the National League) moved the pitcher’s mound to its current 60’ 6,” from 50’. Offense exploded – the batting statistics for the 1894 season are hard to believe. But pitchers adjusted, and by the turn of the century the modern game was in place.
Since then, we’ve had roughly four 20- to 30-year waves of offensive or defensive dominance. (Economic historians have discerned similar long-term “Kondratieff waves” in economic growth, as political scientists identified 36-year “party-system” election cycles.) Using OPS and runs/game averages, you can see the cycles here:
Year OPS R/G TTO
1894 .814 7.39 .15
1908 .602 3.38 .17
1930 .778 5.51 .16
1968 .639 3.42 .25
1999 .782 5.08 .29
2022 .706 4.28 .33
Offense bottomed out in the inaptly-called “dead-ball era” around 1908. This was due less to the composition of the ball than to styles of play, “trick pitches” like the spitball, better gloves, and other factors. An acknowledged change in the composition of the ball (rubber to cork core) raised batting statistics in the 1910s, but not dramatically.
Historians continue to dispute the causes of the end of the first, defensive-dominant, era, by 1920. A livelier ball, if it had anything to do with it, certainly mattered less than the outlawing of spitballs, the replacement of worn-out balls, and the introduction of Babe Ruth and the free swing. (Ruth had very high TTO numbers.) This new style of offensive-dominant baseball continued into the 1930s. Almost every top single-season batting record dates from the 1920-30s or 1990-2000s. Pitchers adjusted again, and World War II drastically undermined offense, but the postwar game still bore the stamp of Babe Ruth.
In the 1960s, the MLB tried to “speed up the game” by expanding the strike zone and raising the pitcher’s mound. This dramatically altered the game and produced a golden age for pitchers – a “second dead-ball era.” In 1968, Bob Gibson threw 13 shutouts and had a 1.12 ERA. Don Drysdale threw six consecutive shutouts for 58 scoreless innings. Denny McLain was the last pitcher to win 30 games (and the first since Dizzy Dean in 1934). Carl Yaztremski won the AL batting title with a measly .301 average. The Yankees hit .214 as a team. To restore the balance, the strike zone was contracted, the mound lowered, and the designated hitter adopted by the AL in 1973.
Aging baseball fans remember the offensive spike of the turn of the millennium. We can’t trace it to any rule change – unless “feel free to use steroids” counts as a rule. Cynics argued that the owners juiced the ball and let the players juice themselves to attract fans after the 1994 strike. (Earlier cynics said the owners livened the ball in 1920 to revive fan interest after the “Black Sox” scandal, and in 1930 to draw them back after the Great Depression.) The anti-steroid reaction set offensive numbers on their current trend.
Our “third dead-ball era,” which induced the 2022-23 rule changes, was itself less a product of rule changes than the previous two – apart from anti-steroid rules. It was mostly a by-product of the 21st century analytics revolution, the application of new technology to existing rules. Nor is today’s offensive trough as deep as it was in 1908 or 1968. Perhaps the fans are satisfied. Attendance rose from 66 to 71 million in 2022-23 and has remained there (though it was 79 million in 2007), and MLB revenue is at an all-time high of over $12 billion. And who knows what the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement after this season will do?
But if more is required, consider that making the mound 60’ 6” in 1893 was probably the most radical change ever made, and the one that did the most to create modern baseball. In what’s often called a “game of inches,” a six-inch setback might do the job.
