Opening Day 1.0 and 1.1 happened last week. There were not a lot of runs involved. The Athletics were the one team to bust out offensively, scoring four runs. In the last 21 games that the Mariners and A's have played since the beginning of 2011, there have been only three where both teams scored more than two runs. Jeff Sullivan has watched them all, occasionally waking up in the middle of the night to do so! This is why he acts the way he does.
Will Scoring Continue To Decline?
We don’t know yet. But if you want to pretend that the first ten games of the season mean something, it sure looks like a trend.
But that’s not a trend. That’s not indicative of anything. That’s the Mariners and A’s getting to the eighth inning of every game and noticing that they forgot to take the donut off the bat. Happens every game. Someone should put a sticky note in the dugout or something. The Mariners and A’s not scoring a lot in the first two games of the season isn’t noteworthy.
Then came opening day 2.0. Kyle Lohse took a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Marlins. The Cardinals managed to score four runs in Marlins Park, despite it being something designed by a person who saw the one 10-9 game at Petco Park and wanted to avoid a similar bandbox. Another game, another team scoring a lone run.
Opening Day 2.1 only featured seven games. In the highest-scoring game, the two teams combined for 11 runs. They needed 16 innings to do it. There was one other game where the two teams both scored more than two runs: Dodgers/Padres at Petco. Of course. You can't keep the runs off the board in a game like that.
That’s ten games. 43 combined runs. That’s … let’s see … divide by ten … fiddle with the decimal point because it seems like something that would help … subtract by asking Marc Normandin for help … and that’s 4.3 combined runs per game so far. That’s just over two runs per team over ten games.
Meaningless, of course. We’re talking ten games out of 2,430, and 20 percent of those games were Mariners/A’s games. But the scoring was low enough to get us thinking about what kind of year we’re in for, and if it will be another pitcher-friendly year. A table of average runs scored in MLB since 1968:
Year Average Runs 2011 4.28 2010 4.38 2009 4.61 2008 4.65 2007 4.80 2006 4.86 2005 4.59 2004 4.81 2003 4.73 2002 4.62 2001 4.78 2000 5.14 1999 5.08 1998 4.79 1997 4.77 1996 5.04 1995 4.85 1994 4.92 1993 4.60 1992 4.12 1991 4.31 1990 4.26 1989 4.13 1988 4.14 1987 4.72 1986 4.41 1985 4.33 1984 4.26 1983 4.31 1982 4.30 1981 4.00 1980 4.29 1979 4.46 1978 4.10 1977 4.47 1976 3.99 1975 4.21 1974 4.12 1973 4.21 1972 3.69 1971 3.89 1970 4.34 1969 4.07 1968 3.42
Things were getting crazy there around the turn of the millennium, but now run scoring is way down. There are some folks who think this has to do with steroids and the Mitchell Report. And there is certainly is some correlation.
Of course, correlation does not always indicate causation.
But that’s not the point. We’re not here to find out why scoring is down. Just remind you that it was -- 2011 was the most pitcher-friendly year in almost two decades. And this is also to point out that the early, early, early returns suggest not much has changed. Ten games. A bunch of Opening Day aces. Not an appropriate sample. Still, it sure didn’t feel a whole lot different from last year.
Maybe it will be a low-scoring year, and maybe it won’t. But I think we can definitely put stats like this behind us:
| Masato Yoshii | 5.86 | 99 |
| Kevin Jarvis | 5.95 | 98 |
| John Wasdin | 5.80 | 101 |
That's a trio of Rockies pitchers from 2000. An ERA+ of 100 indicates a league-average ERA after taking park and league context into account. So those are just three guys who were doing their jobs. Just doin' what the world expected of perfectly capable pitchers. But that Coors Field is gone, replaced with a new, humidor-enriched Coors Field. And even beyond the Coors effect, we're in a totally environment all together.
That sort of thing was normal at one point. No longer. Baseball had a little retro thing last year, taking a trip back to the ‘80s. If you want to make too much of the early returns -- and I sure do! -- it looks like we might stay there for a while.
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