Moments after being doused in celebratory suds last Wednesday, a soaked Christian Yelich was slapping on headphones and a microphone, settling in for a post-game interview. The 26-year-old National League MVP candidate and his Milwaukee Brewers had just beaten the St Louis Cardinals and booked their place in Major League Baseball’s playoffs which start on Tuesday.

It was a strange time for MLB Network personalities to get into a hitting discussion, but the hosts insisted on knowing Yelich’s thoughts on one of baseball’s newer stats: “the vertical angle at which the ball leaves a player’s bat after being struck,” also known as launch angle.

The stat is at the core of a debate concerning a philosophical shift in hitting. Over the past several seasons, hitters have increasingly abandoned the more traditional, contact friendly, line-drive swing, in favor of a riskier method that sends balls high into the air as often as possible. The chances of a home run increase but so do the chances of striking out. This during a time where hitters are already facing a never-ending stream of hurlers who hit 95mph or more on the radar gun and tally up strikeouts.

Yelich, despite his own propensity to strikeout, is a holdout, possessing the scarce combination of hitting for batting average – he led the league at .326 – and power – the outfielder ranked third in the NL with 36 homers. “There’s more than one way to hit a baseball,” said Yelich, who ranks near the bottom of the launch-angle rankings at 316th out of 331 qualified batters.

While what Yelich said is true, many players have made the choice to swing upwards in order to maximize their chances for extra base hits. This has led to sinking batting averages, staggering strikeout totals and most disturbingly, less contact, which results in considerably less action on the playing field.

It’s become an alarming, toxic, season-long theme for a soul-searching sport that has taken a hit on attendance in four consecutive campaigns. Now there is mounting pressure on the MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, to make offseason adjustments to a game which younger people are less interested in and older fans are struggling to recognize.

As is often the case in baseball, the stats tell the story: the major league batting average has dropped below .250 for the first time since 1972 and strikeouts have topped hits for the first time ever.

Batting average, which is the ratio of a batter’s safe hits per official times at bat, was once one of the chief statistical currencies of baseball. An average of .250 was considered average, under .250 was below average, and .300 and above was the mark of an elite hitter.

But batting average doesn’t take into account extra-base hits, and so production numbers such as OPS, a number that combines slugging percentage (which is similar to batting average but rewards doubles, triples and homers) with on base average (how often a batter reaches base through a walk or hit) make more sense today to talent evaluators. So do sexier data points such as launch angle and exit velocity, which shows the speed of the ball off the bat.

The trouble is that you can have a high OPS, while striking out regularly and hitting for a dismal batting average. Joey Gallo is the poster boy for this phenomenon: the Texas Rangers slugger is considered valuable because he ranked third in the league in home runs with 40 and has a solid .815 OPS. But Gallo had a .206 batting average this season, and struck out an abysmal 207 times while walking on 74 occasions. That means he failed to put the ball in play in nearly half of his at bats this season.

Yes, many MLB front offices have discovered that strikeouts, once a sin across the sport, are no longer a shameful result, as long as the whiffs come in exchange for power and patience.

This, of course, makes perfect sense. Scoring runs is the name of the game, and if the groups of sabermetrically minded baseball analysts, some of whom come with degrees from Ivy League universities, have figured out through a series of equations that this is the best way to win, then it is hard to argue with them.

And indeed, six of the 10 teams heading to the playoffs are in the upper half of strikeouts, although it should be noted that Houston and Cleveland, two teams that will face each other in the playoffs this week, are the first and second hardest teams to strike out.

The problem is, if data streams have determined the smartest way to hit is to remove a good chunk of action from the game, then what kind of a game are fans left with?

Baseball is not merely a company, in which reaching maximum efficiency in every department is God. It is also entertainment, and fans want to see athletes make athletic plays. That doesn’t happen when strikeouts, walks or home runs become one of the most common outcomes in an at bat.

We’ve now pretty much figured out that these once common baseball plays – the bunt or the stolen base – are not always the smartest moves statistically, but they are certainly more intriguing than watching strikeout after strikeout. Home runs, which still bring a primal thrill, are less special when they happen all the time. The game seems oddly out of balance, in a way that compares with 1968, a season that was so dramatically ruled by pitchers that the mound was lowered to help batters.

MLB’s response to the “year of the pitcher” was something of a simple fix, but the problems of today are more complex. Rule changes may not be enough to reset baseball’s balance: it could take another shift in what makes a player valuable to help bring some of the action back onto the diamond. Players have always been financially rewarded for home runs, but perhaps fiscal incentives for advancing runners, as hall of fame pitcher John Smoltz has suggested, could help. Of course, banning the soul-destroying infield shift, which plays a major part in the need for hitters to force fly balls, could also inject a sense of hope into those who believe that the only way to beat it is to swing for the downs.

As for this coming postseason, well, good teams usually have high-quality pitching, which often translates to runs coming at a greater premium. Trends being what they are, there’s every chance the 2018 playoffs could be littered with less action than ever, leading to unappealing games. Let’s hope it turns out otherwise, because October is when baseball should be creating new fans of a grand old game.