The defining characteristic of that period in baseball now known as the PED Era isn’t particularly hard to identify: it was power. Home-run totals increased across the game. The long-standing single-season home-run record was broken multiple times in a few years. And, of course, drug testing ultimately revealed that many players were using steroids and other PEDs specifically to aid their physical strength.
Attempting to find a similarly distinctive trend for the decade-plus since testing began isn’t as easy. For a while, the rise of the strikeout seemed to be a candidate. A combination of increased velocity, better relievers, and a bigger strike zone has caused strikeout rates to increase dramatically in recent seasons.
Over the last couple years, though, we’ve also seen another big rise in homers — a product, it seems, both of a fly-ball revolution and potentially juiced ball. We’ve also witnessed the aforementioned growth of the strike zone begin to stagnate, perhaps even to reverse.
The combination of the strikeouts with the homers over the last few years has led to its own sort of trend: an emergence of hitters who record a lot of strikeouts, walks, and homers — each of the three true outcomes, in other words — without actually hitting the ball in play all that often.
The players responsible for this development are the sort who swing and miss frequently while refusing to offer at pitches on which they’re unable to do damage. To get a sense of who I mean, here’s a list of the top-10 players this season by percentage of plays ending in one of the three true outcomes.
Three True Outcome Leaders in 2017
That’s a pretty representative collection of the sort of hitter I’m talking about. Not only are these guys refusing to hit balls in play, they’re being rewarded for it: all but two have recorded distinctly above-average batting lines.
And this group of 10 is representative of a larger trend across the league. Consider how TTO% has changed in the 20-plus years since the strike.
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