Baseball 2024 Post-Mortem

Some random observations

When I started following baseball, there was just the regular season and the World Series. I have never liked the playoffs, which dilute the regular season.¹ If it were up to me, there would be 8-team leagues, with a 154-game season, like it was when I was little. If there were four leagues, you could have a two-round post-season.

Anyway, this post-mortem will just look at the regular season.

Teams that over- or under-performed

The Braves won “only” 90 games, after leading the majors with 104 in 2023. They would have been the best team in baseball again, but Acuna played only 49 games and Strider played only 2. Acuna also was disappointing before he got hurt. His OPS fell from a league-leading 1.012 in 2023 to a mediocre .716 this year.

I think that the Reds were a big disappointment. Playing in a hitter-friendly park, by the end of 2023 they had debuted what appeared to be a devastating offense. Six players under the age of 28 had an OPS greater than .800! But this year, all six flopped. Matt McLain missed the whole season with an injury, and Spencer Steer was by far the best of the rest, with an OPS of .736. The only young Red whose OPS went up was Elly De La Cruz, who gained over a hundred points from his .710 rookie season in 2023. Overall, the Reds scored above the league average in 2023 and below the league average in 2024. Very disappointing.

The White Sox also were a disappointment. Nobody predicted them to be good, but nobody had them losing 120 games, either. They had a promising trio of young hitters: Luis Robert, Eloy Jimenez, and Andrew Vaughn. They had some pitchers. They should have managed to scrape together at least 50 wins.

The Diamondbacks were the opposite of the Reds—they overperformed on offense. In 2023, they were below the league average in runs scored (worse than the Reds). But this year, they led the league in scoring—by a lot! In 2023, the D-backs had three hitters with OPS above .800: Corbin Carroll, Ketel Marte, and Christian Walker. This year, Carroll dropped a hundred points, but Marte gained a hundred points over his “career year” of 2023. The difference from 2023 was that they obtained Joc Pederson and at age 32 he turned in a career year, plus the rest of the starters all were at least decent, with OPS in the mid-.700’s.

The bottom of the batting order matters

An under-appreciated way to improve your offense is to focus on the bottom of the lineup. It was improvement there that explains the D-backs’ success. It also is the explanation for how the Guardians went from half a run below the league average offensively in 2023 to above the league average in 2024.

The Dodgers scored half a run per game less than they did in 2023, despite adding Shohei. The bottom of their batting order could not hold its own.

Getting a better top three in your batting order is expensive. Improving the overall lineup, including the bottom three, would seem to be a lot cheaper, and it may be almost as important.

Pitchers figuring it out?

Scoring was down a bit in both leagues. Maybe pitchers got used to the pitch clock. My speculation is that teams have improved at “figuring out” young hitters. In 2024, I kept seeing hitters get called up, start off hot, and then fade. The “figuring it out” hypothesis might account for the Reds’ problems and the Orioles’ second-half regression. Apart from Gunnar Henderson, the products of the much-hyped Oriole farm system did not produce much. And Henderson’s OPS fell by 170 points the second half of the season—has he been figured out?

But pitchers were still very inconsistent on a year-to-year basis. In 2023 and 2024, Zack Wheeler was the only starting pitcher to repeat among the top 10 in two major categories—strikeouts and WHIP. Apart from Wheeler, the only repeat leader in strikeouts was Dylan Cease, and the only repeat leaders in WHIP were Logan Gilbert and George Kirby. No one repeated in wins or ERA. If you’re playing fantasy baseball, you might as well pick your starting pitchers by throwing darts.

Needed: a bigger, less resilient ball

By far the most common play in baseball is now the strikeout. If this is your idea of fun, then I suggest you follow girls’ softball.

In the WSJ, Jared Diamond writes,

Batting averages are at their lowest point in decades. Strikeouts have continued to soar. The role of the starting pitcher, once seen as baseball’s leading character, has been further diminished into something that better resembles a cameo appearance. 

…One idea under early consideration would be to mandate that starters, with limited exceptions, pitch for at least six innings. This would almost certainly lead to lower velocities, as pitchers would have to conserve energy, which would in turn lead to more balls in play and revert the ace to his place atop the baseball hierarchy. The average start this year was about five innings.

That seems unenforceable. If the pitcher is getting hammered, you have to be able to take him out.

As you know, my solution would be to tinker with the ball. First of all, make it more difficult to grip, so that pitchers could not throw it past the batter so easily. I think that means making it a little bit larger.

But if you make the ball more difficult to pitch, you also want to make it more difficult to hit out of the park. So I would also like to see a ball that is less resilient. I remember as a kid that if you dropped a baseball on the sidewalk, it would barely bounce. Now it comes back up like a tennis ball. That is too resilient.

A larger, less resilient ball would end up in play a lot more. There would not be so many strikeouts and home runs. Baseball would be more interesting.

1. It seems even worse in hockey (which I do not follow), where the regular season hardly matters at all. I can recall the Caps often dominating the regular season and getting bounced out of the playoffs in the first round.