Baseball's Best Decade (35 page)

Mickey Mantle (left) and Hank Aaron

Comparing the Major Leagues,

Decade-by-Decade

By taking a decade-by-decade view of the major leagues as a single organic unit, we can uncover trends that help us determine the kind of baseball played
in each decade, and the strengths and weaknesses of the professional game as it was played in each 10-year period.

Each decade had its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as its own personality. For the most part, those strengths and weaknesses and that personality were shaped by the best players of each decade, those players – whether in the batter’s box or in the field – who defined excellence in terms of years of consistent productivity. A single game in baseball means less than a single contest in any other sport (unless, of course, that single game is played in October). A player’s value is measured against months of games and hundreds of at-bats or innings pitched.

Major league batting averages reached their lowest point in the 1960s, especially 1968, when Carl Yastrzemski won the American league batting title with a .301 average.

The most obvious and general trends between 1920 and the
first decade of the Twenty-First Century involve hitting and its relative impact on pitching (or perhaps, vice versa). Batting averages have become a shadow of what was considered normal in the 1920s, dropping dramatically in the 1930s and 1940s, reaching their lowest point in the 1960s, and then rebounding gradually over the next four decades. While home runs have increased in every decade except the 1940s, run production has been fairly consistent since it reached its lowest point in the 1960s.

Reverse the perspective, and you’ll see that pitching effectiveness gradually improved starting in the 1930s and reached its peak in the 1960s. However, strikeouts, much like home runs on the hitter’s side, have been consistently increasing in every decade, and took a major jump in the 1970s
and 1980s, even with the lower pitching mound and a smaller strike zone.

These are trends that rely on the performances of more than a hand-full of players in any decade. These are signs of subtle but significant ways in which baseball
has changed, and deserve closer inspection. Whether those changes made baseball better in any one decade is for you to decide.

In the 1920s, no major league pitcher struck out as many as 200 batters in a season. The closest any hurler came was Lefty Grove with 194 in 1926. From 1960 on, the only season without at least one 200-strikeout pitcher was the strike-shortened 1981.

When you’re talking about baseball in the 1920s and 1930s, you’re talking about hitting and run scoring. That’s probably because the batting averages, especially in the 1920s, were so astronomical, and
so many of the individual records for home runs, RBIs, runs scored and slugging have rarely been approached.

As you look at the major leagues as a unit, and the growth in 3 offensive categories – hits, home runs and runs – it looks at first glance as if the golden age of baseball offensively occurred in the 2000s. That decade produced 84% more hits, 94% more runs and more than 5 times the number of home runs as batters produced in the 1920s, even though players in the 1920s hit with greater consistency (in terms of batting average) than has been seen in the major leagues since.

The trends for all 3 hitting categories follow a similar path. The 1920s marked the high point in hits until the 1960s, when major league baseball conducted its first expansion since the introduction of the American League in 1901. From the 1960s on, there would be an increasing number of major league teams contributing to the “growth curve” for offensive statistics.
Yet the growth in batting numbers is, in large part, the result of expansion: more teams equal more games. We need to look at how the major league hitters performed on a per-game basis in order to evaluate relative hitting productivity from one decade to another.

Average Hits and Runs Per Game, By Decade

So even with the effectiveness of the pitching in the 1960s, there was still impressive growth in offensive performance as, for the first time, major league hitters topped the performance of their 1920s counterparts in both hits and runs. That increase continued into the 1970s and beyond, unleashed perhaps in part by the rules change in favor of hitters, and also by continued expansion.

Let’s take expansion out of the equation. When you look at hits
and runs per game (for both teams combined), you get a truer picture of the offensive might of the 1920s and 1930s, and the effectiveness of outstanding pitching in the 1960s. In term of hits and runs per game, the teams of the 1990s and 2000s were still significantly behind the 1920s and 1930s clubs. In fact, hits in the 1950s were more prevalent than in any decade after the 1960s, and runs per game were only slightly less in the 1950s than they were in the 2000s.

Even though there were more total hits than any time since the 1920s, the 1960s saw the most dramatic drop in hits per game, 5 less than the 1950s, almost 7 less than the 1920s.
The numbers confirm what those of us who were there remember: that pitchers dominated in the 1960s more than in any other decade since 1920.