Offense in MLB--What has happened?

[BoredViewer]

What about the balls?
 
I remember when offense surged in... 87(?)... it turned out there was a difference with the balls that year.

 

[MentalDisabldLst]

I'm wondering if advanced analytics has made an impact. The game is geared to the pitcher and defense anyways- since most outcomes of an at bat are an out. Has the adoption of Analytics across the sport made it so that batters have an even tougher time- with defenses and pitchers being more easily able to exploit holes and weaknesses / tendencies in swings? Just a thought.

 
I have to imagine that cuts both ways.  If you can exploit holes in a batter's swing, you can exploit tendencies in a pitcher's selection or pick up something in his delivery.

 

[singaporesoxfan]

 
I have to imagine that cuts both ways.  If you can exploit holes in a batter's swing, you can exploit tendencies in a pitcher's selection or pick up something in his delivery.

True but nothing says it has to cut both ways exactly evenly. If baseball is a sport whose balance is tipped towards the pitcher, analytics might just exacerbate that imbalance.

 

[Fred not Lynn]

 
Pitchers duels between Cy Young candidates are good, but no one wants to see a 1-2 game between the 4th starters on each team. Things have gone too far.

I think one of the takeaways from this thread is that while the Cy Young candidates are where they have always been, the #4 starters, and the whole crew of relievers are a whole lot less worse than the Cy guys than they used to be.

 

[OttoC]

This is an interesting article by Inside Edge, written for ESPN, on "A statistical breakdown of our current low-scoring era of baseball," looking at league hitter and pitcher trends since 2005.Unfortunately, it was written in June 2012 and it would be interesting to see it updated. http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8049343/a-statistical-breakdown-age-pitcher
 
I'm not going to go into the article, itself, but I will quote a couple of things (emphases, mine):
 
"Conversely, batting averages on well-hit balls are trending in the opposite direction. Besides dampening the idea that improved defense deserves too much credit for weaker offense, the trend may also suggest that sluggers are doing as well as ever they deliver when they hit the ball hard but that there are fewer hitters in the league capable of making consistently hard contact."
 
"One other item: The percentage of taken strikes has increased slightly, from 27.1 percent in 2005-08 to 28.0 percent in 2009-12. It's a small effect, but indicative of hitters being slightly less aggressive against pitches in the strike zone."
 
(For whatever reason, this editor has decided that the two quotes are external links when they are not intended as such.)