Early Returns: Worrisome!
No, not the primaries. C'mon, this is a sports site
It’s Friday. You made it. Well done you.
It’s not even June. We keep telling ourselves that. The first two months of almost every MLB season ever played have been pockmarked by lousy offensive numbers, and for lots of good reasons.
The weather stinks. It’s hard to hit with frozen hands. They’re playing in stupid, sloppy conditions. Pitchers are ahead of hitters in the early going. And et cetera.
Even on that sliding scale, though, the returns in 2026 are somewhere south of depressed. (In therapy?) As of this scribbling, the MLB overall batting average, through a collective 63,675 plate appearances, is an onionskin-thin .240, with a league-wide OPS of .706. OPS is a combination of on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, and while it’s not a complete tell when it comes to how offenses are functioning in baseball, it does reveal a good chunk of the truth.
That truthy chunk: Dear lord. Also, woof.
Here’s some context. In the history of organized professional baseball, which according to the bible dates to 1871, there have been exactly three seasons in which MLB’s collective batting average landed below .240. In both 1888 and 1908, the league average was .239 (the period from roughly 1900 to 1920 is recalled as the dead-ball era), and it slunk down to an all-time rotten .237 in 1968, a result so mortifying and fan-unfriendly that MLB lowered the height of the pitcher’s mound the following year to give hitters a better chance.
Again, it’s still the month of May, and baseball history suggests that as the weather warms and the air becomes less dense, offensive numbers will rise. But there’s no way around the larger fact that, among the 10 lowest collective batting averages in MLB history, three of them have been recorded in the last five years. We’re well on track for a fourth bottom-10 finish in this decade.
Offenses haven’t completely cratered, simply because pitchers here in 2026 are more willing to issue a walk than they are to put a pitch squarely in a hit zone. (The current walk rate of 3.50 per game is 20th-highest of all time.) So teams still have some traffic on the bases, which is good for game-watching — but they’re getting there in a passive way, which is very, very bad for game-watching.
If anything, we’re standing knee-deep in “three true outcomes” territory for any given at-bat, those outcomes being walk, home run or strikeout. You see the high walk rate above; the home run rate of 1.06 per game is top-20 all time, and the strikeout rate of 8.35 per game is top-10 all time. (Just a reminder that we’re talking about all the years going back to 1871, so “all time” really is doing some heavy lifting here.)
It’s the usual suspects, of course. Pitchers are simply better than ever, period — a better array of pitches that are thrown harder, with sharper drops and bigger breaks, at angles not attempted on such a widespread basis at any previous point in baseball history.
At the same time, and perhaps because of that amplitude of variety, pitchers are willingly throwing out of the strike zone more often, trying to inflate hitters’ whiff rates and perhaps grab some check-swing glory. The league-wide ERA is 4.05, which isn’t historically impressive — but it sure isn’t happening because guys are bashing the ball around the field, which is what a lot of fans would pay money to see.
Whether MLB attempts further fixes to this problem depends upon whether anyone thinks it’s actually a problem. Early-season attendance at games is already up from 2025, and 2025 marked the third straight year of solid growth as the sport emerged from the Covid years.
I say “further fixes” because it isn’t as though baseball’s leadership hasn’t tried to goose offenses. The installation of both the pitch clock and the ball/strike challenge system were thought to be a potential boon to offense, as was banning the most severe defensive shifts, as was adding the DH in both leagues, as was looking the other way on steroids and other performance enhancers for as long as humanly possible. (Hey, it was a solid run.)
MLB can shrink the strike zone, or enforce the one already on the books, although that’s partly what the ABS challenge system is designed to facilitate. It can move the pitcher’s mound farther back, which sounds drastic, or force defensive players to remain in a more restricted position prior to the pitch than current shifting allows, which sounds, you know…stupid.
Nothing has worked on a forever basis. The forever in baseball is that pitching runs ahead of hitting; otherwise, we wouldn’t canonize players who fail in 7 out of every 10 at-bats. It’s hard. It’s getting harder. It looks historically hard once again this season. Come on, summer.
Hey bro. I would also consider this the one-inning-and-done era for pitchers. I wouldn't know the stats, but it feels like starting pitchers (maybe up to the 2000's or so) were pretty regular at 7 innings, then a reliver or two depending on righties/lefties, a shellacking, etc. Anyway, today it seems that clubs today regularly use 5 pitchers, all of whom throw fire and wicked breaking balls. Just another consideration in the low BA period.