How international free agents killed offense in baseball

In the 1950s, baseball expanded without adding any new franchises. After going from 1903 to 1947 without dramatically increasing the talent pool and not adding any new teams, the flood gates opened up, adding at least 10% of the country’s baseball players back into that pool. While it started with just Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby in 1947, by 1959 African Americans, who had been previously relegated to the Negro Leagues, made up about 10% of all Major League Baseball players. By the late 1960s that number was nearer to 20% as those very deserving players who had been long excluded were allowed to excel in the Major Leagues. Much like with the Moneyball Athletics, those teams who took advantage of the market disparity early on, like the Dodgers and Indians, were very successful in those initial years.

There may have been another unintended consequence of this integration. From 1920 through 1941, the 16 Major League teams scored at least a combined total of 10,000 runs each season, averaging almost 12,000 per year. After a few down years in the 1940s (likely because many of the more talented players were forced to join the war effort), offense returned to it’s normal state through 1956. Just as the number of African Americans in baseball began to be mirror their percentage in the population however, the runs dropped off. As J.C. Bradbury pointed out in his book, The Baseball Economist, this had nothing to do with race, but with the size of the talent pool compared to the number of teams. The bigger the talent pool is, the more pitching will dominate and the more that pool is spread thin by the addition of new teams, the more the offense will take over.

In 1961, baseball responded to the increased population and expanded to more than 16 teams for the first time since 1901, adding the “new” Senators (later, the Rangers) and Angels and the Mets and Colt 45s (later, the Astros) a year later. After averaging 667 runs per team from 1951 through 1960, the average team jumped to 719 runs in 1961 and 723 runs in 1962 as hitters were able to get more and more at bats against what were minor league pitchers just the year before. This trend has shown itself more than once as each time baseball expanded, there was an increase in runs scored (as shown at right). In addition, each time, as the population grew in the country (and in the talent pool), the average runs scored per team tended to drop off over time.

Similarly, while many took the increase in runs in the 1990s to be proof of steroid use, the numbers fit right in line with earlier expansions, especially seeing that the years from 1990 through 1992 (averaged 682 runs per team) were almost identical to the 1980’s as a whole (average of 672 runs). Once the expansion in 1993 came around however, things exploded and in the full (non-strike) seasons from 1993 through 1999, Major League teams averaged over 100 more runs per season at 786. Since there hadn’t been an expansion since 1977, the effect was particularly dramatic.

The reason why this is particularly relevant right now, is because it is happening again. It has been 16 years since the last expansion and in addition to the population increase in the United States, baseball has been increasingly adding players from other markets. The chart to the right shows the increase in players from some particularly quickly growing markets since that last season of expansion. While baseball has been international even longer than it has been racially integrated, there is a constantly increasing landscape from which to mine new stars. Even some countries that have supplied Major Leaguers for decades, like Cuba, have seen an increase.

In addition to those long term countries (like the Dominican Republic and Venezuela), there have been a few newer markets, including Colombia, Brazil, and Taiwan, that were never tapped until the 2000s. While these newly scouted nations have yet to provide a large total of players, this will likely to increase in the future and when added to the rest of the listed countries, show a marked increase of eight percent since 1998. Included as others in addition to the United States are countries that have been exploited to their maximum such as Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Nicaragua among others.

While the simple increase in population both domestically and abroad could be enough to explain the lowest average runs scored per team (in any non-strike shortened season) since 1976, it is necessary to go deeper than total foreign born players. In addition to an increase in total players available to pick from, the quality in players has gone up as well. It is just a small sample size, but comparing the six Japanese pitchers in 1998 to the top six Japanese pitchers in 2014, there is a huge difference.

Above is a quick stat line of those pitchers, which doesn’t even include the above average seasons from Daisuke Matsuzaka and Tsuyoshi Wada in 2014, which were better individually than all but Shigetoshi Hasegawa in 1998. There have been many changes in the Japanese landscape over the years since 1998, mostly in how they come to the Major Leagues. With the new bidding process, it is much easier and cheaper for Major League teams to draw from the Nippon League than in the past. Superstar Japanese players (like Matsuzaka, Masahiro Tanaka, Ichiro Suzuki, and Hideki Matsui) are also much more likely to be willing to make the trip than they were in the 1990’s. While this has aided the increase in talent from Japan, it also seems to be the case all around the world. Like the Japanese pitchers, the current class of Cuban players, including Jose Abreu and Aroldis Chapman, is the best since the embargo while Shin-Soo Choo and Hyun-Jin Ryu are the greatest South Koreans in Major League Baseball history. This is obviously the case as well in the newly scouted countries such as Taiwan (Wei-Yin Chen) and Australia (Grant Balfour). This improvement likely stems from a combination of better scouting, increased incentive to play in America and, in places like Australia and Taiwan, more local interest in the sport as a whole.

What all this really means is that baseball is getting better. Increasing the talent pool that Major League Baseball draws upon can only mean we will see better athletes on the field and better games because of it. Drawing those players internationally is also important as more and more young Americans turn to soccer, basketball and football instead of Little League. It would be hard to find a baseball fan who believed that more talented athletes playing baseball in America would be a bad thing, but there is still the disappearing offense to account for.

In addition to the generalization that more players per team to choose from leads to less offense (for more on that, please reference the Bradbury book listed above), there is a more direct cause in this situation. Everything in baseball starts with the pitcher and it is up to the hitter to learn what the opposing pitcher can do and react to it. The unknown can be a pitcher’s greatest ally, especially if hitters don’t have accurate scouting reports and have to learn on the fly. American pitchers get this benefit to a small degree, often leading to a great rookie season followed by a “sophomore slump,” but foreign pitchers have an even greater benefit. Hurlers like Chapman, who come from countries where American scouts can’t even access and those with the typical Japanese style of delivery, which American players are not familiar with, have a distinct advantage for their first few seasons. Of the players counted in the country-by-country chart above, there were 137 pitchers from the ten countries that played during the 2014 season (compared to just 80 in 1998) including 75 from the Dominican Republic, 32 from Venezuela, and nine from Japan. Many of these wound up as All-Stars as, just like in the 1950’s, the players being added to the league are not generally just average role players, but the best in the world at the sport.

Of course, this (among other things like an increase in infield shifts) has lead to a huge decrease in runs scored all across the league and that may not be a good thing. The baseball renaissance in the late 1990s that helped save the sport was largely caused by the huge increase in runs scored. Thanks to the established sluggers (like Ken Griffey, Jr., Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa) getting significant at bats against the poor Devil Rays, Marlins, Diamondbacks, and Rockies pitching staffs, there were plenty of home runs to go around. At its peak, MLB offenses averaged 828 runs per team per season from 1999 through 2000, a number that has steadily declined, especially from 2006 to today. While in the past, drastic measures have been taken in similar situations, such as livening the ball, lowering the mound, and surreptitiously allowing steroids to enter the locker room, perhaps the safest, fairest and most effective way to increase the offense would be to expand the league again. It’s been a long time and there are too many deserving cities to get into here, but before Major League Baseball considers a plethora of rule changes to return baseball to the offensive show it once was, maybe they should consider the solution that has worked every single time it was used in the past. Expanding the sport of baseball to new markets.