Hitters across Major League Baseball can take heart: They were, in fact, getting robbed of hits and extra bases all throughout April.
The anecdotal factors at hand – a deadened baseball, the use of humidors in every major league stadium, expanded pitching staffs to mitigate a 99-day lockout – conspired to send batting average to its lowest level (.233) in history and runs scored to its second-lowest total (4.08 per team game) in 41 years.
Yet those elements, along with brutally cold conditions in what’s typically baseball’s most challenging month can be more easily explained away, possibly the result of a smaller sample size.
More disconcerting to the hitter is measuring traditional statistics with the league’s Statcast data, revealing a massive gulf in how hard players are hitting the ball and the results they’ve received.
