Thursday, June 10, 2021
Year to year changes, 2021 to 2020
My colleague Mike Petriello noted that pitchers are striking out (as batters) a tremendous amount this season. And we know in 2020 we had the universal DH. So that got me thinking:
When we exclude the very few pitchers-as-batters, in the abbreviated 2020 regular season, we had 66,492 plate appearances.
When we exclude the very many pitchers-as-batters, in the current 2021 regular season, we have 66,326 plate appearances. We’re less than 200 PA short, which we’ll reach some time this afternoon. In order to make a one-to-one comparison this morning, I will pro-rate the 2020 season down by one fourth of 1%. In other words, I’ll multiply all the counting numbers by 0.9975. Therefore, the 2020 numbers I will show you is based on 66,326 PA (and all pitchers-as-batters excluded).
2021 season currently has 8927 singles. The 2020 season was at 8915. We currently have 12 more singles, which is 100.1% the number of singles of 2020. In other words, virtually an identical number of singles.
The 2021 doubles are down by 16, but the triples are up by 16. In other words, we’ve hit an identical number of 2B+3B. Those numbers: 2800 - 2816 doubles and 256 - 240 triples (2021 is always the first number shown).
Year to year changes for homeruns are of course all over the place, not to mention we are comparing the warmer 2020 season to the colder 2021 season. 2019 for example was a jump of 20% from 2018, which was a drop of 9% from 2017, which jumped by 8% over 2016. Indeed, starting from the 2007 season, the average change (increase or decrease) season to season is 9%, with a wide range of 1% to 20%. So, our pre-season expectation, for any season, is that we should see a difference of ~9% in HR. And 9% is what we see comparing 2021 to 2020: we have 207 fewer HR, which is a 9% drop.
We’ve had 38 fewer HBP (5% fewer) and 54 more IBB (27% more).
Unintentional walks are down 144 (2.5% fewer) while we have 62 more strikeouts (0.4% more).
Number of errors is very similar, down by 5 (0.8% fewer).
We’ve had 181 more groundouts and 104 more airouts, or 285 more field outs.
If we remove the TTO (“three” true outcomes, which is really four, meaning HR, SO, BB and HBP), we are left with BIP (balls in the field of play). The counts for those:
2021: 41,900
2020: 41,626
That’s a difference of 274 more balls in play (or +0.6%).
To be continued…
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