ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
There's a saying that baseball is the only place where you're considered great if you succeed only 30% of the time. Now in Major League Baseball, that famous benchmark - a batting average of .300 - has become an endangered species. NPR's Becky Sullivan has the story.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: I came to Philadelphia because the Phillies are one of the best teams in baseball. They've got a lineup stacked with some of the league's best hitters, including shortstop Trea Turner, who is one of only eight guys in the Major Leagues with a batting average over .300.
KEVIN LONG: It's the toughest thing in all of sports to do, and it's becoming tougher.
SULLIVAN: This is Kevin Long, the hitting coach for the Phillies. He's worked in the major leagues for almost two decades now. He's won two World Series rings. But his job has gotten a lot harder over the last five years or so.
LONG: It's probably a good time for me to retire maybe (laughter).
SULLIVAN: Chatting in the Phillies dugout, Long ticks off reason after reason why there are so few .300 hitters these days.
LONG: It was looked down upon...
SULLIVAN: Guys strike out more often.
LONG: ...To strike out.
SULLIVAN: Hitters loft the ball hoping for homers, but that leads to more flyouts.
LONG: Well, those can be dangerous.
SULLIVAN: In the end, though, Long says you got to look at the guys throwing the ball.
LONG: Now, the biggest factor when we really look at it is the pitching.
SULLIVAN: This year, right-handers are throwing four-seam fastballs at an average speed of 95 miles per hour. Starting pitchers tend to get pulled from the game sooner - almost an inning earlier than they did even a decade ago - because now every team has a bullpen full of fast-throwing guys.
LONG: You used to want to get to the bullpen. I don't know that that's necessarily the case anymore because you get to these bullpen arms, they're all throwing 97 to 102.
SULLIVAN: The last time there were this few .300 hitters, it was 1968. That's a year that's infamous in baseball history. It's called the year of the pitcher. A league-wide offensive slump led to record or near-record lows in all kinds of offensive statistics - batting average, runs, hits, you name it. The best hitter in the American League that year was Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox. His batting average of .301 is still the lowest ever to win a league batting title.
MIKE YASTRZEMSKI: You know, obviously I wasn't playing at that time, so I'm not going to pass any judgments. But all I know is that it is very hard to get a hit in a major league game today.
SULLIVAN: This is Mike Yastrzemski, Carl's grandson. He's an outfielder for the Kansas City Royals, hitting .229 this season. He says modern analytics and scouting mean that anyone can pull up a video of literally any time he has swung the bat to find his weak spots.
YASTRZEMSKI: You know, for someone like me, I've had seven years' worth of data for these guys to dig through. And so if they know they're going to pitch me a certain way and they play their defense in a certain spot, it's probably going to be a lot harder for me to get a hit.
SULLIVAN: Batters now have to do a lot more work to have success at the plate, says Harrison Bader. He's an outfielder on the Phillies, hitting .283. He told me the way he prepares for games has had to change.
HARRISON BADER: It just really just depends, and it's different every single day. It's different every single at bat, and quite frankly, it's different pitch to pitch. And I think that's what makes, you know, the art of hitting something that really kind of is an art.
SULLIVAN: Even so, the game's most elite pitchers, like Paul Skenes for Pittsburgh or Tarik Skubal in Detroit, have given up fewer hits than they've pitched innings. So maybe it's no surprise the teams have decided to prioritize scoring over getting on base. Here's Kansas City Royals infielder Michael Massey.
MICHAEL MASSEY: If you think you're going to go out there off of Tarik Skubal and put three or four hits together in an inning, good luck. And so I think what teams and what players have come to is they've said, well, when he makes a mistake - 'cause he doesn't make many of them - we need to capitalize.
SULLIVAN: Hitting for power instead of hitting for average has its trade-offs - strikeouts, pop flies. But boy, you can't argue with the scoreboard. A home run changes that with just one swing at the bat.
(APPLAUSE)
SULLIVAN: In the stands, I find Eric Kondash and his two daughters, Alyssa and Olivia. They're here for a family night - all of them big Phillies fans. I asked them to join the debate. Home runs or small ball, which is more fun?
OLIVIA KONDASH: Home runs.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Home runs.
ALYSSA KONDASH: Home runs (laughter).
ERIC KONDASH: Well, yeah, I do. But I like to see a long inning with singles and doubles...
OLIVIA: Yeah.
KONDASH: ...And moving runners.
OLIVIA: Excitement.
KONDASH: Of course, yeah, I want to see a home run. That gets everybody pumped. But get on base, manufacture some runs, play baseball, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF ORGAN MUSIC)
SULLIVAN: To that, the Phillies say, why not both? In the second inning, the home team strung together a double, a walk, a single, then a sacrifice fly to score their first run. The next inning, Bryce Harper hit a 2-run homer to break the game open.
(CHEERING)
SULLIVAN: Becky Sullivan, NPR News, Philadelphia.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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