MLB's inaction problem: Strikeouts, time of game on pace for record highs

Dee Gordon, all 5-11, 170 pounds of him, feels like a dinosaur.

It has nothing to do with his size. The Miami Marlins second baseman looks at the way offense is evolving in baseball and wonders how long there will be a place for a speedy slap hitter like him.

Strikeouts, walks and home runs continue to climb. Stolen bases are nearly an anachronism. Launch angles and exit velocities are all the rage. Hitting a chopper and running like crazy? Not so much.

“I’m the last of a dying breed,’’ said Gordon, the 2015 National League batting champ who served an 80-game suspension last year after flunking a doping test. “In a few years there might not be any more fast guys. It’s going to be everybody going station to station waiting for a three-run homer.’’

Earl Weaver might approve, but that’s probably not where baseball wants to go. Commissioner Rob Manfred has already expressed concern about the diminishing amount of action in the game, and the ongoing trends can do nothing but give him sleepless nights.

If it held, the current batting average of .251 would tie for the lowest in the majors for a full season since 1972. Strikeouts have continued their ascendant trajectory, with today’s average of 8.23 representing an increase of nearly two per team per game in a mere 12 years. And it’s a 17% increase from as recently as 2010, when the downward arc of offense began.

“Everyone’s throwing 95-plus now,’’ said Atlanta Braves second baseman Brandon Phillips, one of many players who see a correlation between higher pitching velocity – the average major league fastball is up to 92 mph – and the increase in strikeouts and walks.

The number of pitches per at-bat, 3.89, is at its highest in a decade, helping average game times again edge over the three-hour mark to 3:04, which would be a record high.

And walks continue to proliferate, with the current rate of 6.62 per game (for both clubs) the game’s highest in nine years.

“I have some younger kids and they talk about the action-no action in baseball,’’ said Marlins manager Don Mattingly, who hit .307 over a 14-year career. “Strikeouts, no action. Walk, there’s no action. I’d like to see more balls put in play as a manager.’’

Of those that do get put in play, more are leaving the field than ever before, partly as a result of hitters’ increased emphasis on “doing damage’’ even if it comes at the expense of strikeouts, which don’t carry the stigma they used to.

Not even during the free-for-all days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when baseball did not have a PED policy with penalties, did home runs sail out of ballparks at their current pace of 1.23 per team per game, the most ever. The weather has not yet warmed, and 2017 sluggers should easily outpace the previous high of 1.17 homers per game in 2000, a year regarded in some quarters as the apex of the steroid era.

The go-for-bust mind-set has given rise to so-called three-true-outcome sluggers like the San Diego Padres’ Ryan Schimpf and the Texas Rangers’ Joey Gallo, who combine big strikeout totals with bursts of power and a high walk percentage. Schimpf has gone deep 14 times but is batting .165. Gallo’s 16 homers come with a .202 batting average.

Again, not much action coming from their at-bats other than the home runs.

“For me it’s not how many times I put the bat on the ball,’’ Gallo said, “it’s about what I do when I put the bat on the ball.’’

Gallo’s uppercut swing produces the majors’ steepest average launch angle (27.5), a figure provided by MLB’s Statcast system in recent years to indicate the ball’s vertical direction leaving the bat. A ball hit at launch angle of 25-35 degrees combined with an exit velocity – another Statcast number, this time indicating speed off the bat – in the 95 mph-plus range generally results in a home run.

Armed with this knowledge, hitters like the Washington Nationals’ Daniel Murphy, the Oakland Athletics’ Yonder Alonso and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Justin Turner have dramatically enhanced their production by raising their launch angle.

Murphy never hit more than 14 homers in his seven seasons with the New York Mets, but altered his mechanics in his final year and broke out for seven home runs in his first nine games of the 2015 playoffs.

Last season, after joining the Nationals, he finished second in the NL MVP race after setting career marks with a .347 batting average, 25 homers, 104 RBI, a .595 slugging percentage and a .985 OPS. Not coincidentally, his launch angle went from 11.1 degrees in 2015 to 16.6 in his first year in Washington.

Teammates Ryan Zimmerman and Anthony Rendon have also found improved results by hiking their launch angles, each of them currently sporting an OPS above .900.

But Zimmerman, who’s enjoying a career renaissance after a series of injury-marred seasons, said he’s neither a convert nor a Luddite when it comes to advanced metrics like launch angle and exit velocity, and didn’t consider them in making offensive adjustments.

After years of misery, Nationals' Ryan Zimmerman enjoying resurgence

“I know my swing,’’ Zimmerman said. “I know the way I should feel when I’m going good.’’

And even as he enjoys the fruits of Alonso’s long-awaited power surge – the 6-1, 230-pound first baseman has 15 homers, six more than his previous career best – A’s manager Bob Melvin warns that the mechanical alterations he undertook are not for everyone.

“Whether it’s hitting coaches in the offseason, Internet coaches they have, there is an emphasis on launch angle and exit velocity,’’ Melvin said. “I think it’s dangerous in that some of the guys who should be hitting the ball on the ground are trying more to hit the ball in the air, and I don’t think that helps them out, so you have to understand who you are.

“But it’s there, it’s part of the game now, and it’s being implemented everywhere, not only in what you’re trying to get across to a hitter in our instruction with them, but how you evaluate hitters, how you scout them. It’s all-in as far as that goes.’’

Oddly, at time when batters are being told to hit the ball in the air and stay off the ground - and less balls are in play at all thanks to home run and strikeout proliferation - double plays are up slightly.

At 0.81 per game, double plays are at their highest level since 2007. Some infielders point to the proliferation of defensive shifts as a reason, with more hard-hit groundballs that used to go for hits now turning into outs. Others say the rule aimed at protecting the pivot man from takeout slides, implemented in 2016, enables infielders to turn double plays with conviction.

“As a second baseman, you don’t have to be as clean with your footwork because there’s no threat,’’ San Francisco Giants Gold Glover Joe Panik said. “You don’t have to worry about protecting yourself. I have seen a difference in aggression at second base.’’

Whatever the reason, it’s yet another suppressor of offense - and action. That boost in home runs has been largely negated by the parade of whiffs, walks and twin killings.

No wonder a two-time stolen-base champion like Gordon, who has nine home runs and a .288 batting average for his seven-year career, is feeling so out of place.

“I talk to the older guys about it like, ‘Man, we’re all taught to hit for a high average to get drafted,’’’ Gordon said. “There’s no team that’s going to take a kid hitting .210 in college or high school. I don’t get it when you get to the big leagues how the mentality changes.

“But those guys are getting paid a lot of money to do it.’’