Written by Joseph Coblitz at Bloguin
You don’t have to look far to see how much baseball has changed in the past few years. We are far from the days of Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds blasting 70 home runs, instead entering an age where pitchers don’t even sniff the MLB ERA title unless they are well below 2.00.
Looking at the extremes doesn’t tell the whole story, however. The top slugger in baseball this year was Chris Davis, who hit a very respectable 47 home runs and the top pitcher has had an ERA below 2.00 in nine of the last 22 seasons. Where a bigger break is found is when you expand the field. This year, the 10th best pitcher in baseball was John Lackey, with an ERA of 2.77, a number that was only surpassed once, in 2014, by the tenth best pitcher since 1992. In fact, that number would have made Lackey the top in baseball in 2006 and second in 2007.
Moving into an even wider view the above graph shows the runs scored per plate appearance over the history of modern baseball. There are fairly obvious breaking points and the known eras can be picked out fairly easily. The period from 1901 through 1919 is known as the deadball era, but there are other trends well beyond that. These are broke down further in the chart below.
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