Major League Baseball’s Great Hitting Depression

Hitters in 2021 can’t claim novelty as an excuse. They can blame the speed of the fastballs whizzing by them. Or perhaps it’s their home-run focused approach that’s failing. Maybe it’s because of the shift or sticky substances purportedly on some pitchers’ fingers

But the numbers are clear: hitting is going through a steep depression in 2021. 

The season isn’t yet two months old, but even a small fraction of a Major League Baseball season produces a remarkable amount of information. There have already been more than 50,000 plate appearances and more than 200,000 pitches. It’s such a rich dataset that statistical oddities have been erased by sheer volume. 

Those statistics suggest that hitters have been going to the plate with toothpicks in their hands instead of baseball bats. Strikeouts have continued their meteoric ascent to an all-time high. On-base plus slugging is at its second lowest in the last 25 years. Batting average is .0001 away from the all-time low. 

Batting average, at .237 on the season, is considered a crude metric in modern baseball because it doesn’t account for walks and treats home runs the same as singles. It simply measures hits. And that makes it an extraordinarily informative measure for the tell-tale sign of this season: the six no-hitters—seven if you include one that came in a seven-inning double header. 

Baseball insiders say numerous factors have converged on this one season. Pitchers are throwing faster than ever. Batters are paying the price for swinging for the fences over making contact. The baseball itself is even different after years of analyses showing that the recent home run boom was buoyed by baseballs that had less drag. 

“It’s been coming, and it’s been building,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said recently. “It’s a game that is sometimes unwatchable.” 

MLB teams in recent years have made a trade-off that created a seismic change within the sport. Batters changed their swings to sacrifice how often they make contact for the type of explosive contact that produces a trot around the bases. Their aim also became to do damage on every swing, regardless of the count—shortening up with two strikes to make contact became a thing of the past. 

That revolution has led to all-time highs in home runs and strikeouts in recent seasons. The strategy was a smash. In 2019, OPS reached its highest since MLB had to investigate the rampant use of performance enhancing drugs in the sport. 

But in 2021, this has turned into a bargain with the devil. A record 24.1% of all plate appearances are now ending in strikeouts. Batters are suddenly losing the trade-off: Over the last two seasons, OPS has fallen from .758 to .708. 

The irony is that a series of changes to the game produced the exact opposite outcome. Observed changes to the ball helped drive home runs through the roof and turned even mediocre hitters into Barry Bonds. Hitters had every incentive to continue with the same approach. It was working. 

In 2014, teams averaged 4.07 runs per game, the lowest in more than three decades, while teams hit just 0.86 homers a game, the fewest in more than 20 years. Over the following five seasons, runs per game rose to 4.83 while home runs reached 1.39—an all-time high. It didn’t matter that strikeouts were skyrocketing because there was a lucrative payoff. 

But a series of shifts—some gradual, some immediate and some that are actually just fielders shifting—tilted the scales in the other direction. 

Four-seam fastballs in 2021 are going an average of 93.8 miles per hour. That’s more than a full 1 mph faster than just a decade ago. This year 14.1% of pitches are going at least 95—up from 13.1% just a year ago. 

“Guys have less chance to react. The stuff is spinning more. They’re facing more breaking pitches,” former Mets pitcher and current analyst

Ron Darling

said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a more challenging time for hitters.”

It’s not just the speed. It’s the spin. Pitchers’ use of foreign substances to manipulate the ball, while always prevalent, became so widespread that MLB sent a memo to teams before the season unveiling a crackdown. Just Wednesday night, controversy erupted when umpires forced St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Giovanny Gallegos to remove his cap to be inspected because of some suspicious sticky stuff. 

“This is baseball’s dirty little secret,” said Cardinals manager Mike Shildt, who was ejected from the game. 

So much has changed that no-hitters are accessible to pitchers you’ve never heard of, not just flame-throwing aces. Even the Detroit Tigers’ Spencer Turnbull has a no-no. In 2019, baseball’s last complete season, his record was 3-17.

“That tells you there are some issues within the game that need to be addressed—and they’re going to take a while,” Mattingly said.

In three stunning pieces of bad luck—or simply horrible hitting—a trio of teams has managed to be no-hit twice already before Memorial Day. Less stunning is the fact that one of them is the Seattle Mariners, who were batting a league-worst .202 heading into Thursday’s games.

But pitchers aren’t done rewriting the history books. Darling believes that landmarks of pitching, such as Tom Seaver fanning 10 consecutive batters or Kerry Wood and Roger Clemens’s 20 strikeouts in a game, could fall before the season is over. 

“All of the records that we thought were untouchable,” Darling said, “they’re all going down this year.”

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com