This article is part of our Collette Calls series.
We are now, somehow, already into our third month of the baseball season. It does seem like just yesterday we were wrapping up our drafts and getting excited for Opening Day, yet we will see most teams hit the 60 games played mark at some point in the coming days. During the first month of the season, I was tweeting out daily updates to the stats as we all struggled to figure out what offense was going to do under the new rules. We quickly learned the impact the rule changes were having as steals were up, ratios were way up and injuries were unfortunately rising seemingly even more rapidly. The good news, according to Derek Rhoads from Baseball Prospectus, is that injury rates have finally cooled off and current levels are similar to what they were in 2021 and 2022 at this time. The challenge there is that those rates were higher than they had been in other seasons, due to the sudden jumps in workload while bouncing back from the abbreviated 2020 season as well as the lockout which disrupted camp in 2022.
We now have clean data to review to see both how the statistics are evolving within the season as well as how they compare to this time last season. Let's dive in!
Stat | March/April 23 | May 23 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
BA | 0.247 | 0.249 | 0.8% |
BABIP | 0.298 | 0.296 | -0.7% |
HR/Contact | 4.5% | 4.6% | 2.2% |
Barrels/PA | 5.5% | 5.6% | 1.8% |
Barrels/Contact | 8.2% | 8.3% | 1.2% |
HR/FB | 12.2% | 12.4% | 1.6% |
SB% | 79% |
We are now, somehow, already into our third month of the baseball season. It does seem like just yesterday we were wrapping up our drafts and getting excited for Opening Day, yet we will see most teams hit the 60 games played mark at some point in the coming days. During the first month of the season, I was tweeting out daily updates to the stats as we all struggled to figure out what offense was going to do under the new rules. We quickly learned the impact the rule changes were having as steals were up, ratios were way up and injuries were unfortunately rising seemingly even more rapidly. The good news, according to Derek Rhoads from Baseball Prospectus, is that injury rates have finally cooled off and current levels are similar to what they were in 2021 and 2022 at this time. The challenge there is that those rates were higher than they had been in other seasons, due to the sudden jumps in workload while bouncing back from the abbreviated 2020 season as well as the lockout which disrupted camp in 2022.
We now have clean data to review to see both how the statistics are evolving within the season as well as how they compare to this time last season. Let's dive in!
Stat | March/April 23 | May 23 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
BA | 0.247 | 0.249 | 0.8% |
BABIP | 0.298 | 0.296 | -0.7% |
HR/Contact | 4.5% | 4.6% | 2.2% |
Barrels/PA | 5.5% | 5.6% | 1.8% |
Barrels/Contact | 8.2% | 8.3% | 1.2% |
HR/FB | 12.2% | 12.4% | 1.6% |
SB% | 79% | 80% | 0.6% |
SBA%* | 6.5% | 6.4% | -1.5% |
Avg pulled FB dist | 339 | 338 | -0.3% |
HR every _ PA | 33.5 | 32.2 | 4.0% |
AB/HR | 29.8 | 28.8 | 3.5% |
K% | 23.0% | 22.3% | -3.0% |
BB% | 8.8% | 8.7% | -1.1% |
BABIP GB Pulled & Straightaway | 0.227 | 0.218 | -4.0% |
BABIP LD Pulled & Straightaway | 0.645 | 0.642 | -0.5% |
TTO% | 34.8% | 34.1% | -2.0% |
SP ERA | 4.55 | 4.47 | -1.8% |
SP wOBA | 0.326 | 0.324 | -0.6% |
SP BABIP | 0.303 | 0.298 | -1.7% |
SP K-BB% | 14.1% | 13.8% | -2.1% |
RP ERA | 4.08 | 4.06 | -0.5% |
RP wOBA | 0.306 | 0.31 | 1.3% |
RP BABIP | 0.287 | 0.292 | 1.7% |
RP K-BB% | 14.5% | 14.3% | -1.4% |
I have not yet seen a climate report for this past month, but if all politics are local, then so are weather opinions. May has been unseasonably cool in the Charlotte area, as I've turned on my downstairs HVAC for two or three days while my upstairs HVAC is still running minimally. I haven't seen a triple-digit utility bill in months, and that is not the norm for May. Memorial Day weekend saw the weather barely get over 70 degrees, whereas this time last year I spent the entire weekend by the water or by a grill. Meanwhile, I spoke with an educator on Wednesday morning who was hitting 90 degrees just south of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I haven't seen that number in a weather forecast since early September in my area.
This is a long-winded attempt to attempt to explain that the weather forecast likely has been about what has been expected for May, yet it wouldn't surprise me if the report comes in with cooler temperatures because I'm not seeing the increase in statistical production in May I would have expected to see. Nothing off the bat has yet begun to aggressively change, as most changes have been incremental improvements. We saw homers at a slightly higher rate as well even if the runs per nine innings was down ever so slightly from 4.71 to 4.62. We also saw a welcome trend in non-batted ball events as the league strikeout rate declined and the Three-True-Outcome percentage declined as well. A leading driver for the new rules was the fear the game was becoming drunk on strikeouts, so it's encouraging to see contact returning to the game after watching it get increasingly worse in recent years.
The biggest story has been the steals, as what we thought may be just a hot trend appears to be here to stay. The league swiped 12 fewer bases in May (590) than it did in March/April (602), but there were also fewer games played in May. The rate of steals attempted, and successfully converted, was up in May compared to the first "month" of the season:
Year | G | SBatt | SB | CS | SB% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2023-Mar | 40 | 0.90 | 0.78 | 0.13 | 86.1% |
2023-Apr | 810 | 0.89 | 0.70 | 0.19 | 79.0% |
2023-May | 830 | 0.89 | 0.71 | 0.18 | 79.9% |
2023 | 1680 | 0.89 | 0.71 | 0.18 | 79.6% |
The league continues to run and run extremely well, as the average team is 40 of 50 in its attempted steals, but several pitching and catching batteries are struggling to slow this aspect of the game down. There is a direct correlation between the increased number of runners in scoring position and the increased runs per game that we see now, as the league is scoring 4.65 runs per nine innings this season compared to 4.35 this time last season. Both of those figures are at or below where offenses were from 2019-2021, but the early third of this season is absolutely showing more offense than we saw this time last year. The ERA for starting pitching dropped from 4.55 in the first month to 4.47 in May, but that is still 8.8 percent higher than the 4.11 ERA we saw in May of 2022. Relievers have been relatively unchanged as their 4.06 ERA this past month is nearly identical to their effort in May of 2022. Steals do tend to wane as the season wears on, but we've also never had a season with conditions such as this one and teams will continue to run until pitchers and catchers tell them they cannot. This season alone, we've seen 14 different teams steal as many as five bases in a game. There were 18 such games combined between the 2021 and 2022 seasons!
Finally, we can look at the impact of the positioning rule changes to the game:
The Law of Unintended Consequences tells us that people's actions always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. The purpose of the reductions of shifts was to put more action in to the game, yet the batting average on groundballs is just four points higher this season than it was for the entirety of 2022. Lefties have enjoyed a 10-point boost to their batting average on grounders while righties have seen just a two-point surge. The batting average on line drives was already very high in the game, but it has gone up 18 points overall, with lefties seeing a 27-point gain while righties have seen just a 12-point gain.
We knew the rule changes would be impactful to lefties, and we have certainly seen players such as Kevin Kiermaier and Anthony Rizzo do much better hitting for average this season than they have in many years, something which plays out across the league. Batting average on groundballs hit up the middle or to the pull side are up 23 points for lefties, going from .188 last season to .211 this season. Righties aren't shifted at nearly the same frequency and have seen nary a difference in their batting average on similar balls in play as it stands at .231, up one whole point from 2022.
The unintended consequences of these new positioning rules are that the league has seen an overall decline of 21 points in batting average on groundballs to the opposite field but an 80-point drop in such events for lefties, whose batting average on opposite-field grounders has dipped from .493 in 2022 to .413 this season. Righties are saving the day, hitting 18 points better on groundballs to the opposite field, posting .402 average compared to .384 last season. This is why the macro-level gains in batting average haven't been as high as many expected for lefties this season. The shift hasn't been completely banned, and for every ball that sneaks through a more wide-open right side, some batters are missing that gaping hole on the other side of the infield which allowed for others to roll safely into play.
In all, stolen bases and their impact on runs, RBIs as well as ERAs appear to be here to stay. Batting average truly has not changed much this season or even compared to this time last season, but the league is attempting steals 28 percent more frequently when the next base is opened compared to early 2022, which has helped push ERAs for starting pitchers up as much as they've risen to date (8.8 percent over last year.) If that warmer weather shows up in June as we all expect it to, we could see another level of offense combining steals as well as homers behind them leading to fewer stranded runners. We do have some big name starting pitchers on their way back with Triston McKenzie returning this weekend and Tyler Glasnow only recently returning to the mound, so hopefully pitching gets better soon. Then again, Chris Sale just left the game in Boston tonight as I was working on this article, so two steps forward, one step back.
