Hoornstra: 2021 season showcases the many quirks of baseball’s ‘new normal’
By week’s end, all 30 teams in Major League Baseball will have played their 54th game. The regular season will be one-third complete.
Some teams will have played their 60th game, a milestone that puts the shockingly short 2020 campaign in perspective. Something about the traditional baseball calendar imbues a proper sense of time passing from spring to summer to fall to winter. Without that, it was easy to write off the 2020 season entirely. The 2021 season is not so easy to dismiss.
Tracking the season’s top storylines, that’s the logical place to start.
Back to normal-ish
Despite some early trepidation among fans and logistical mishaps at the ballpark, “normal” feels within reach at most stadiums these days.
All but three Major League Baseball counties in the United States are reporting lower rates of new COVID-19 cases compared to Opening Day. Only 34 players have tested positive since monitoring testing began in spring training, according to the league, and 81 percent are fully vaccinated as of Friday. Fans are slowly getting there. Baseball is holding its usual mirror to a gradually re-opened society.
It’s OK to miss the unmasked comforts of a pre-pandemic ballpark. The smell of grilled hamburgers might be the last thing to return to Angel Stadium. At least Shohei Ohtani has been a blast to watch.
No news is good news
As far as the public is concerned, the needle of baseball labor negotiations has moved once.
The New York Post reported in May the MLB Players’ Association filed a grievance seeking monetary compensation because MLB didn’t act in good faith to play as many games as possible in 2020. MLB filed a counter-grievance, according to the Post.
For fans of uninterrupted labor peace, this was bad news. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement is set to expire Dec. 1. This grievance represents another parallel process to the negotiations that must take place to determine baseball’s future. By simply agreeing to extend the CBA a year, both sides could have allowed time for the economic dust to settle from the pandemic-shortened season. Instead, another vehicle for animus emerged.
At least the CBA discussions themselves have been kept under wraps. Perhaps that’s a good sign. A general rule of thumb when it comes to labor negotiations: no news is good news.
Injuries and load management
In 2010, teams combined to use a total of 635 pitchers for the entire season. Through Tuesday, with seven teams still shy of the 54-game mark, they had combined to use 638. How and why we arrived there so soon is complicated, but the effect is undisputed: it’s really hard to know everyone wearing a major league uniform these days.
That’s especially true for pitchers, who have accounted for more than 60 percent of all injured list stays. Some of that might be owed to bad luck with COVID. Some teams might be using the IL as a tool for pitcher workload management. (Other clubs, like the Angels, are using six-man rotations to ration innings.) Often pitchers are simply succumbing to common baseball injuries, a bad omen as we approach the 60-game threshold their bodies were accustomed to last season.
Position players have been hit hard too ― at times literally. Bryce Harper took a 97-mph fastball to his face in April. Injuries like these are hardly evidence of a trend in most years. When it comes to batters being hit by pitches in 2021 …
The new dead-ball era
… Try to resist using the term “epidemic.” (Still too soon.) There have been 705 hit batters through Tuesday, on pace for an all-time record. What’s going on?
The answer is complicated. A funny thing happens when you try to untangle the reasons for just about any on-field phenomenon of 2021 (lower batting average, lower home runs, more no-hitters, more hit batters, more wild pitches): the changes to the baseball itself explain a lot.
In February, MLB sent a memo to all 30 clubs outlining how the regular-season baseballs would be different this year. By loosening the wool within the ball in order to reduce its weight, the ball became more difficult to hit out of the ballpark. The isolated slugging percentage (slugging percentage minus batting average) on barrelled balls has never been lower since Statcast began tracking barrels in 2015.
The 2021 baseball is also easier for pitchers to spin by their own account, an observation confirmed by Statcast. Deaden the baseball, and make it easier for pitchers to spin, and you get an environment very unfriendly to hitters. It’s no wonder batting average (.236) and on-base percentage (.312) are tracking near 1968 levels (.237/.299).
Also
The Oakland A’s have been looking for a new ballpark in the Bay Area for more than two decades. Recently they began looking in Las Vegas. It’s a sad but predictable turn in the team’s quest for public financing for a bayfront ballpark in Oakland.
Minor league baseball is back, and not a minute too soon. In their markets, a minor league team represents a source of civic pride and affordable entertainment in a way major league teams do not. For minor league players, a season without baseball was difficult to navigate too. The mascots are the best.
Kudos to MLB for making Wednesday the inaugural “Lou Gehrig Day” across the league. Baseball has a built-in platform for raising awareness of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a fatal, crippling disease of the central nervous system. A number of ALS-focused charities stand to benefit financially. The occasion will be observed every year on June 2.