Malcolm: Are we really back in 1968? Not yet
From SABR member Don Malcolm at Big Bad Baseball on April 20, 2012:
The talk concerning offensive retrenchment has been with us for just about eighteen months, somewhere toward the end of 2010, when it became clear that run scoring was, in fact, going south. Now, in the light of a young season where further incursions into pitcher dominance are front and center, and the focus returning to the classic concept of the “pitcher’s duel,” it’s probably a good time to put all this burgeoning talk into some kind of numerical perspective.
One of the long-time (meaning since we’ve had them readily available…) “stat splits” for team performance is its record in “low-scoring games”. That category has, so far as we can recall, always been quantified as “games where the total runs scored by both teams adds up to six or less.” So that’s where we’ll start in pursuing a “topographical” perspective on the change in offense.
Usually these splits focus on team performance, but we can also use them to look at facets of overall run-scoring performance. In this instance: what’s the percentage of games where both teams combine to score six runs or less?
Read the full article here: http://bigbadbaseball.blogspot.com/2012/04/are-we-really-back-in-1968-no-not-yet.html
Originally published: April 20, 2012. Last Updated: April 20, 2012.