The Year of the Pitcher

According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is The Year of the Tiger ... not according to Matt Garza.

The 26 year old Tampa Bay flamethrower no-hit the Detroit Tigers a few nights ago. His 120 pitch, one walk no-hitter was the fifth (should be sixth) no-hitter of a season that's not even two-thirds of the way through yet. There have now been 268 no-hitters in baseball's history since 1875, an average of about two per season. The question is now, - as it always is I guess when phenomenon in sports occur - is this just a fluke in baseball history or is this a significant signal that maybe this isn't just The Year of the Pitcher, but The Era of the Pitcher?

The five no-hitters thrown already (six if you count Armando Galaragga's "perfect game"), are as many as Major League Baseball has seen in a single season since 1991, when twelve no-nos were thrown, a few years before steroid usage started to grow amongst players. The two perfect games so far (three if you count Galaragga's) - from Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay - are the most ever in a season, since 1880, which makes sense as only 20 of them have been thrown in the history of baseball.

Then there's the average amount of runs scored per team. The past few years have seen average run production per team go down tremendously. Back in 2006, when baseball was finally starting to move away from steroids, the league average for runs in a season was 787. The following year the number fell to 777, then 753, then 747 and finally this year the number is on track to be 721. On top of that, there's the home run hitting we've seen this year, or lack thereof. Only three players in the league are on track to hit 40 home runs or more. That's a significant amount less than the five last year, the sixteen that accomplished the feat back in 2000, or the 11 to do it as recently as 2006.

So, it's pretty clear that pitchers have the leg up this year, but what is the main reason?

One popular response concerns the decline of steroid use. Many players, including former MVP and users Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco, as well as Curt Schilling put the percentage of players using steroids at the peak of the Steroid Age as 50%. After Major League Baseball began cracking down on steroids however, especially by making more severe punishments for steroid use, the percentage of users went down tremendously.

The biggest effect that steroids have are helping hitters hit the ball farther and get more home runs, as well as more quality hits. Steroids also improve the mentality of hitters. In addition to actually allowing you to become stronger, steroids give users more confidence when they step up to the plate.

Although I think that the lack of steroid usage lately may certainly be a factor in the dominance of pitching in the league, I don't think it's the main one. I've gone on the record in one of my articles published in The Hoya - titled "Pitchers With Juiced Arms Are Guilty Too" - as basically saying that steroids helped pitchers as much as it did batters. Although steroids don't necessarily improve a pitcher's performance as much as it does with hitters, they allow a pitcher to re-energize and "efficiently reload the weapons that are their pitching arms." Therefore, pitchers are suffering from the crackdown on steroids at least as much as hitters are.

The other popular opinion, the one that I believe is the main factor, is the fact that more pitchers are throwing faster than ever before. In the past, if you had two or three guys in your rotation or even your bullpen that could throw above 95 mph, you were pretty well off. Now teams have seven or eight pitchers on the roster that can throw that fast, and guys that can throw 98 mph sometimes aren't even well known any more. It seems as if every night that I watch a Yankee game, there's always some youngster on the other team coming out of the bullpen and throwing heat in the high 90s.

Now sure, modern day hitters look more like football players, than the marathon runners they used to resemble, but that doesn't make it easier to catch up to a fastball. Although I'm sure that there are a lot more different methods out there for increasing bat speed and improving reaction time than there were even a decade ago, those methods haven't helped an extreme amount, as you can only increase your reaction time and bat speed by so much.

So, with hitters not swinging the bat much faster or seeing the ball much better than they used to, it's tough to keep up with pitchers throwing the ball 3 mph faster. Plus, these hitters have to hit day in and day out against guys that can throw 95 mph plus consistently.

With all of that being considered it seems obvious that there is actually a reason behind The Year of the Pitcher. But, there's also the idea that all of this is just sheer luck, and that all of 2010's no hitters occurred just by chance. But history shows that big pitching years come in packages. For example, there was the Dead Ball Era from 1900 - 1920, where games were low-scoring and home runs were few and far between., as a result of the worn out, softer balls that were used. During that time frame, 46 no-hitters were thrown, slightly above average. After that era, the next big pitching surge came in the late 60s, when dominating pitchers started to sprout up everywhere you looked. What we're seeing now is similar to what occurred in the late 60s and early 70s when from 1967 - 1976, 45 no-hitters were thrown, way above the average. As a result, in 1969 the mound was dropped from 15 to 10 inches, and the size of the strike zone was reduced. After that only made a small dent in pitching dominance, the DH position was implemented in the American League to try to give hitters another leg up. The early 90s saw another great crop of pitchers coming up, with 20 no-hitters being thrown during the 1990 and 1991 seasons, but the Steroid Era ended up cutting into their glory during the mid 90s.

Now, it will be interesting to see whether the dominance of pitching remains intact and if it does, will Major League Baseball do anything to curtail it? Can you really make the mound any lower or farther away, or reduce the strike zone again? It's common knowledge that chicks dig the long ball (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ltD21rYWVw), but who knows? Maybe sooner or later, chicks will learn to dig the fastball instead.