Passan: 25 things you didn’t know about baseball, 2015 edition
From Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports on September 24, 2015, with mention of SABR members Jon Roegele and Daren Willman:
Never has there been a better time to understand baseball and the minutiae that defines every game. We know the speed of every pitch and the speed of the ball off the bat. We know how far fielders run and how fast they run and how far they throw and how fast they throw. You want it, they’ve got it. Modern baseball is Amazon for the curious.
Trying to scrape together 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Baseball, then, gets tougher and tougher every year. Thankfully, FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, Baseball-Reference, Baseball Savant, Hardball Times, Brooks Baseball and StatCorner all exist. They’re run by people evermore curious, and their incredible insight, thirst for numbers and indispensible databases inspired much of this column. So enjoy the information dump that follows and know that it’s but a fraction of the knowledge being traded among the inquisitive who find the intricacies of the game as fascinating as the game itself.
1. Scoring in baseball is way, way up, and home runs are flying like the ball is juiced.
Earlier this month, Jon Roegele at the Hardball Times noted that after four years of a depressed run environment, scoring exploded in August to 4.49 runs per game after not eclipsing 4.3 per game once in the previous 17 months.
With September nearly complete, the numbers are even more staggering: Roegele said teams are averaging 4.63 runs per game in September, the highest per-game total since 4.78 in August 2009. Considering the last three Septembers have been far and away the lowest-scoring months of the year – last season, run scoring in September was barely above 3.9 runs per game – this is especially curious.
Read the full article here: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/25-things-you-didn-t-know-about-baseball–bryce-harper-vs–ted-williams-233507125.html
Originally published: September 24, 2015. Last Updated: September 24, 2015.