Five decades ago, in the now infamous summer of 1968, baseball faced a serious problem: Nobody could score.

St. Louis Cardinals legend Bob Gibson posted a 1.12 ERA, still a record for the live-ball era, which began in 1920. Hitters reached base less than 30% of the time, a level of ineptitude that harkened back to the 19th century. Teams finished with a combined .237 batting average, the lowest in history, resulting in just 3.42 runs a game. That winter, the league lowered the mound in an effort to generate offense, the lasting legacy of a season known as the “Year of the Pitcher.”

But as ugly as that looked, it in some ways doesn’t compare to the state of affairs today. For the first time ever, major-league batters strike out more often than they record hits, the ultimate distillation of the realities of modern baseball, where power—on both sides of the ball—reigns.

Never before had MLB seen a full month with more total strikeouts than hits. There hadn’t even been a month where the gap between the two was less than 100. April 2017 was the closest the sport had come to strikeouts overtaking hits, with a difference of 138.

Until now, that is.

Heading into Monday’s slate, the final 11 scheduled contests on the April schedule, hitters had whiffed 7,163 times. They had collected just 6,808 hits. Nearly 35% of all plate appearances this season have ended in a walk, strikeout or home run, up from less than 29% 10 years ago.


Home runs and strikeouts aren’t inherently bad for baseball on their own. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and union chief Tony Clark have both pointed out, correctly, that fans generally enjoy those plays and consider them exciting.

Taken together, however, these are alarming numbers, signaling a potentially crisis-level event, as balls in play continue their descent into endangered-species status. Fewer balls in play means more dead time and players standing on the field not doing all that much—is a product difficult to sell to new fans.

“Where it gets troubling from a fan perspective is tons and tons of strikeouts, no action, lots of pitching changes,” Manfred said last summer. “That combination is troubling to me.”

The current issue isn’t that teams can’t scratch runs across. Overall run-scoring is almost identical to this time last season and actually above that of Aprils from 2011 through 2016, thanks largely to the rise of the homer. Hits per game haven’t changed from April 2017. The pendulum hasn’t swung completely in favor of the pitcher quite yet.


The biggest culprit is the remarkable amount of strikeouts—8.74 per nine innings in 2018 through Sunday, which would be a new record.

None of this should come as too much of a shock to anybody paying attention. MLB has set a new strikeout record every year since 2008, while 2017 was the most homer-happy season to date, shattering the previous mark by more than 400. There were only 2,111 more hits than strikeouts last year, the smallest gap ever by far—a sign that barring a major course correction, a new paradigm would soon arrive.

This April has suggested that it has come sooner than expected, and looking at the data, it isn’t too hard to see why: Batters swing and miss more frequently than ever before, making contact on just 76.6% of swings so far this season, down from 79.4% in 2013 and 80.7% in 2008.

There are clear reasons for this phenomenon. Most of them, like virtually every other significant change to baseball these days, have been brought about by analytics.

Nelson Cruz of the Seattle Mariners swings during a strikeout. MLB has set a new strikeout record every year since 2008, while 2017 was the most homer-happy season to date. Photo: Lindsey Wasson/Getty Images

Strikeouts have climbed steadily throughout history. Bill James, the godfather of advanced statistics in baseball, wrote in 2012 that this is likely because teams are incentivized to seek them out: High-strikeout pitchers are, on the whole, more effective than their low-strikeout counterparts. Meanwhile, perhaps counterintuitively, hitters who strike out a lot are as productive—if not more productive—than hitters who don’t strike out much, as high-strikeout hitters tend to bash more home runs.


“This asymmetry pushes strikeout totals higher over time,” James wrote, adding, “strikeouts, in my opinion, will continue to go up.”

He was right. Baseball now has an army of pitchers who throw harder than ever, with the average fastball now approaching 93 mph, up from 90.7 mph a decade ago. Relievers bring even more fire, with their average fastballs nearing 94 mph. In 2017, 65 different relievers threw a pitch that traveled at least 99 mph, up from 37 in 2012.

Yoenis Cespedes of the New York Mets reacts after striking out. Photo: Denis Poroy/Getty Images

And that’s scary for batters, since starting around the sixth inning, they can count on seeing a fresh bullpen arm ready to unleash the heat. Gone are the days where a hitter could count on seeing a tired, worn-down starter late in games. Now, pitchers are instructed to throw as hard as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can, knowing they have help behind them.

An evolution in hitting strategy has contributed as well. The strikeout has lost its stigma, as teams, relying on data, are “figuring out the cost benefit of an all-or-nothing swing,” one high-ranking American League official said. In other words, sacrificing contact for power is smart strategy, and the idea of a hitter changing his approach with two strikes to avoid a strikeout is largely antiquated.


“There have been dramatic changes in the game, the way the game’s taught, the way the game is played at the big-league level,” Manfred said.

It’s too early to say for certain that there will be more strikeouts than hits over the course of the season. After an unseasonably cold April across large swaths of the country, offense should improve as the weather starts to warm up.

But there’s no doubt that a line has been crossed—and the baseball landscape has changed because of it.

“Other sports have been more aggressive about managing what’s going on on the field in terms of what their game looks like than we have been, and I’m certainly open to the idea that we should take a more aggressive posture,” Manfred said.

Write to Jared Diamond at jared.diamond@wsj.com