MLB’s ‘Three True Outcomes’ are all down, for the first time in 17 years. Why?

A very weird thing has happened to the Three True Outcomes in 2022, on their way to devouring the sport of baseball. See if you spot a surprising trend here.

If that trend you spotted was all of the Three True Outcomes going down this season, you win. And if you’re thinking that must be rare, it’s because the Three True Outcomes have been the Space Shuttle of all baseball trends — roaring upward year after year for more than a decade and a half.

And then, whaddayaknow, gravity finally kicked in, here in 2022. It’s the first time all three of those Outcomes — homers, strikeouts and walks — have gone down in the same season in 17 years (since 2005) … which was the only previous season it had happened in the last 30 years.

But remember, baseball three decades ago was almost a completely different sport. The average team hit only five home runs a week in 1992. That rate had practically doubled by 2019. The average pitching staff in 1992 had a strikeout rate like Chi Chi González (5.6 per 9 innings pitched). By two years ago, the average K rate (9.2 per 9 IP) was closing in on Nolan Ryan (9.5).

So we’d gotten used to the idea that the home runs would keep flying and the strikeouts would keep mounting — and the high Three True Outcomes sky would just get higher. Turns out we were wrong about that. So the question is …

What happened?

Why would homers and strikeouts and walks all drop this year — or, if you really think about it, any year? What has been driving that trifecta? We asked that question of executives and veteran hitting coaches around the game. Even they were confused, and admitted it readily.

“I don’t have a good theory for you on that one,” said a thoughtful American League executive.

“I don’t know why,” said a National League exec who had a long career as a big-league hitter. “I’m really surprised by the last two (strikeouts and walks both going down).”

“I don’t know,” said Braves hitting coach Kevin Seitzer, who got 1,500 hits as a player and coached that Braves team that won the World Series last fall. “I don’t have a theory for you because I’m surprised by those numbers.”

But just because they couldn’t figure it out doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t at least try. So here is how we’ll do this. We rounded up the best theories we could from those executives and hitting coaches. Then we unleashed our own analytics guru, Eno Sarris, to see if they were onto something. It was a fascinating exercise. See what you think.

It must be the baseball

This was the most common and most convenient explanation we heard. The ball is different. So the home run rate is suddenly back to 2015 levels. And there are lots of ripple effects. Here is how one NL executive put it:

“It’s pretty clear why home runs are down. I haven’t done a ton of research on how that’s affecting the other two. Maybe there are some subtle changes in the ball that have cut down on strikeouts and helped command.

“The other thing is, whether it’s conscious or not, if the pitchers are aware the ball’s not flying out like a Pro V1, they tend to pitch to contact a little bit more.”

So how does that theory hold up? Here’s Eno.

Eno Sarris: Offense is indeed down, you might have noticed. A couple of things are obscuring how much it’s down, though. As Joe Sheehan pointed out in his newsletter, there’s a rash of position players pitching, and they allow a ridiculous .405/.466/.773 line when they’re pitching. We should probably take them out of the sample. Also, there are no more pitchers hitting! You’d expect that to increase offense, too. The extra innings rules are adding offense. There’s also the changing strikeout rate to deal with. And then the weather is warming, so we should compare like to like.

So, to get a sense of how much homers are down, let’s look only at home runs on contact during the first nine innings of a ballgame when the pitcher was not a position player, and let’s do it month by month. Simple, right? Thanks to Baseball Savant, it is.

Ok, yes, we’ve established the first thing. Homers are still down, and aside from April — remember, there were two balls used last year and that would mess with the numbers some — they are consistently down around 10 percent from last season. Despite the fact that the humidor is playing a role in this, there’s not really great evidence that the humidor’s role is changing as we enter the humid months. It’s some combination of the humidor and the league using one deadened ball that is the source of the reduction in home runs.

As for the strikeouts and contact part, stay tuned.

Nolan Arenado of the St. Louis Cardinals homers earlier this month. (Joe Puetz / Getty Images)

When home runs disappear, walks disappear

We should always remember that numbers in baseball don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re connected. But some stats are more connected than others. Here’s an AL executive on that topic.

“Home runs and walks go together. When home runs go down, they usually work together with walks. I’m honestly not sure why strikeouts are down. I don’t have a good theory for you on that one.”

Is he onto something?

Sarris: This is sort of an amazing chart that speaks for itself. Look how well home run rates and walk rates track together!

It’s kind of mesmerizing, isn’t it? One goes up, the other goes up, one goes down, the other goes down.

Walks are the result of being afraid of the big fly, to some extent. Fewer homers to worry about, and the pitcher is more likely to pitch in the zone and walk fewer guys. It’s something that’s been proven on the player level, that the more damage a batter can do, the farther the pitcher will be from the center of the zone. But it’s also intuitive.

Walk rates and whiff rates don’t usually hang out together

Then again, some stats are less connected than others. Walks and strikeouts would be two of those – unless you’re Joey Gallo. So when we spoke with one NL exec, he got the reasoning for the home run rate. But walks and strikeouts? What’s up with that, he wondered.

“I’m really surprised by (strikeouts and walks both declining),” he said. “I just know, watching the game every night, you don’t see the command. You don’t see the craft of painting corners and throwing it with precision to all four quadrants. But I don’t see how that explains why strikeouts and walks are both down.”

So is there an explanation he’s missing?

Sarris: Let’s return to some of those other external factors that have changed around baseball. Pitchers were striking out a whopping 45 percent of the time in 2021 before that experiment was ended. Just removing them from the sample gives us a better idea of how much the strikeout rate has dropped.

Non-pitchers’ strikeout rate in 2021: 22.6 percent
Non-pitchers’ strikeout rate in 2022: 22.3 percent

OK, so just taking the pitchers out of the batters’ box was a big part of why strikeouts seem down this year. But there was also a huge brouhaha last year. Remember the sticky stuff controversy? It seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? But there was enforcement that reduced the spin rate across the league, and spin rate by itself does have a connection to outcomes. There was an MLB memo in mid-June last year, and we saw the rates go down afterward. So let’s repeat the exercise above, but compare the last two months of 2021 to the first few months of 2022.

Non-pitchers’ strikeout rate in July through September 2021: 21.9 percent
Non-pitchers’ strikeout rate in 2022: 22.3 percent

Ah-hah. Taking the pitchers (and Spider Tack) out of the equation shows that strikeout rate is actually steady underneath. Still, if the point was to reduce strikeouts, those two efforts were successful in turning back the ever-advancing tide of Ks, all the way back to 2017. There’s more work to do.

Maybe hitters are changing their approach

It took about three innings into this season for everyone to notice that the baseball no longer flies like it used to, back in the good old rocketball days of 2019 and 2020. As we said earlier, that has had more ripple effects — obvious and subtle — than most casual observers think.

But is it possible that one of those ripple effects is that hitters have begun to understand it’s time to do something different, since big launch angles and barrels haven’t produced the results they used to? At least one AL exec thinks that’s happening:

“I do feel like I’ve seen more hitters pan the field and recognize the shift,” says the exec. “So they shorten their swing to go the other way in certain spots. The game-planning is so good now, I actually think it’s helping hitters adjust. And I think the decline in walks per game speaks to that.

“Right now, there’s more info going to the dugout between innings than I’ve ever known of. So in-game adjustments are happening. And that might be why walks and strikeouts are both down. All the info on pitcher profiles for that night could be helping the hitter.”

Is that a real thing?

Sarris: Maybe. I, too, have heard from coaches who are starting to see hitters take advantage of open real estate. And some hitters will even admit it.

“I fell in love with the homer in college and became a dead-pull try-to-hit-a-homer-every-time type of hitter,” said the Diamondbacks’ leadoff hitter Josh Rojas. “I kept hitting into the shift, that ball in the four-hole is an out every time, and even the ball up the middle is an out. I said, screw the homer, I just want to get on base as much as I can, and I started to spray the ball more and find the holes.”

So there are players doing it. When you zoom out, you can find a little evidence that the league is slowly catching on. Against the shift and with no runners on base, left-handers are going to the opposite field more in the last two seasons than they have in the Statcast Era (since 2015) at least. But … the effect is small.

Basically, this says that lefties so far this season have gone oppo into the shift 52 more times than they would’ve, comparably, in 2016. I’d say this is closer to natural variance than any sort of real finding.

Josh Rojas in June (Joe Camporeale / USA Today)

Do opposites suddenly attract again?

Along those same lines, Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long also thinks hitters have changed because the deadened ball and mysterious humidor effect have forced them to change. Are they looking to shoot the ball through holes on the other side of the field in a big spot? Here’s why he thinks the hitters are different in 2022:

“Probably because guys are finding out like, listen, it doesn’t matter how hard I hit the ball. It’s not going anywhere. So I’m going to shorten my swing down and I’m going to try to find some more holes. I heard Jeff McNeil say the other day something like, ‘I don’t even care if I hit it 47 miles per hour. I just want to find a hole because it doesn’t do me any good to swing harder, because the ball is not going out.’

“I know with our team, we’re aggressive. I don’t know why the swing rates in general would go up. But maybe because you can cover more (of the strike zone) when you’re not trying to do as much. So if you’re not trying to do as much, you’ve got more bat-to-ball skill, which allows you to expand a little bit.”

Is that what’s happening sport-wide?

Sarris: Let’s lead with the swing rates, without addressing the reason behind it first. Because there is something funky going on with swing rates across the league — batters are swinging more than they ever have in the pitch-tracking era, at balls and at strikes. But this isn’t going to look significant on a graph, or in a table, because batters are swinging at 47.4 percent of the pitches they see now, up from 45.4 percent in 2008.

That just doesn’t seem like a big deal when you say it like that.

But it probably is! The march upward in swing rates has been steady, increasing a little with every year. The two highest swing rates have come in the last two seasons, and the three highest in the past four seasons. Batters are swinging at 32.3 percent of the pitches they see outside of the zone now, compared to 24.9 percent in 2008. And then consider this: we’re talking about over 700,000 pitches a season, or even 384,000 this season.

So remember when we compared the shift opportunities over time to see what the real change was? If batters were swinging at pitches the same way they did back in 2008, they’d have swung at over 7,600 fewer pitches by this point in the season.

That actually seems like a big deal.

It’s all about the swing

Or maybe there’s an explanation for the rising walk rate that’s so basic, we’re overthinking it. Maybe, said Seitzer, the hitters are just swinging more, and making less hard contact.

“I’m surprised by those numbers. Now the walks being down, I’m not surprised, because guys are swinging a lot. And maybe they’re swinging a lot more and putting balls in play instead of striking out. I mean, I don’t feel like we are, but you’re seeing that across the league. Has the exit velocity been down? Because I feel like there’s a lot of soft contact.”

But do the numbers across the sport match the eye test of a longtime hitting coach? Let’s ask Eno.

Sarris: Batters seem to want to hit the ball hard, still. The percentage of balls hit over 95 mph is a Statcast-Era-high 38.7 percent and the average exit velocity is in the same range it’s been for the last four years, really.

But you have to be careful here to make sure you don’t invalidate what people are seeing on the ground based on league-wide numbers like this. Because exit velocity is a complicated result that is part hitter, part pitch velocity, and also part ball construction. While exit velocity is probably five parts bat speed and one part pitch speed, that still leaves some possible effect from the fact fastball velocity is up to 93.9 mph this season, yet another record in a string of records. And then we know that the construction of the ball has been changing in recent years, and that balls can have more or less bounce depending on the materials used.

In other words, it’s pretty complicated. I wouldn’t tell anyone they’re wrong about what they see based on these overall numbers.

So is it all of the above?

All right, let’s review what we’ve learned. But before we do, here’s the deal with trying to explain anything in baseball: It’s never as simple as we want it to be. We always look for one explanation when, most of the time, there are a million.

It starts with the baseball, because it always does. But every action has a reaction. Every barrel that doesn’t leave the yard leaves a mark on the guy who hit it and the pitcher who is grateful for that gopherball he didn’t give up. So thanks to Eno’s great work, we have seen …

• The deadened baseball increasingly looks like the culprit for the drop in home runs.

• The weather has heated up, but the long-ball rate hasn’t heated up with it — at least not at a pace anywhere near what was expected. So apparently, it’s not all about the humidor.

• The decline in walks? We connected those dots to the decline in homers. Walks rise when pitchers are afraid of what happens when the ball is in the strike zone. And the decline in that fear factor is like the Fourth True Outcome.

• But why are strikeouts down? Exactly why you’d expect them to go down once you remember the big picture: No more Spider Tack. And no more pitchers traipsing toward home plate with a bat!

• And how do the drops in walks and whiffs go together? Turns out hitters are letting it fly now, at rates we haven’t seen in the recent past. And some of them are even learning to flip balls the other way to beat the shift.

So this is why we stare at baseball’s most important numbers. They don’t define the game; they illuminate the game. And they tell us something about shifting trends in the game.

Sometimes those trends shift in ways we’re not used to. And we hate it when that happens. Even the smartest front offices, coaching staffs and analysts in baseball have to regroup at times to look deeper inside what those numbers and trends are really telling us.

But the bottom line is, it’s mostly a good thing if the Three True Outcomes aren’t dictating the way baseball is played, every inning, every night. What we don’t know — what we can never know — is if any of this is permanent and lasting, or whether the sport is already doing its usual deep dive on how to adjust back.

So don’t touch that remote. As the Three True Outcomes dip and dive, we promise we’ll be on that case!

(Top image: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photos: Brett Davis, Greg Fiume, Steph Chambers / Getty Images)