This Was the Lowest-Scoring ALCS in History

You might have heard offense has been down this postseason. I think one or two articles have been written about it. After the Blue Jays were shut out for the second time in the American League Championship Series, I wanted to see how much it’s been down. What I found: this ALCS was one of the lowest-scoring in history.

First, a little refresher. The ALCS has existed since 1969. From ’69 until 1984, it was a best-of-five series. Since, it’s been a best of seven. You probably already knew that, but just in case, now you definitely know. And knowing…

Anyway, there were 20 runs scored in this series — 12 by Cleveland, eight by the Blue Jays. This makes it the lowest of any ALCS since it moved to a best-of-seven format. The only series that comes close is the 1990 ALCS, when the A’s scored 20 runs to the Red Sox’ measly four. It’s also easily the lowest of any series in terms of runs per game.

But we can reach further back, and see that it was historically low even when compared to the best-of-five days:

Only two ALCSs produced fewer total runs scored — and, in both cases, the teams played fewer games. You may notice that 4.0 runs per game (that’s for the whole game, not just one team) is the lowest on this list. It is, in fact, the lowest in history:

But as Jeff noted yesterday (along with others), the run environment is a little different these days. So I wanted to be a little objective about it. What I did was divide the runs scored per game for each team in ALCS history against the average runs scored per game in the AL for their given season. This creates a sort of runs below or above average metric. Let’s add that in to our table.

Cleveland lands at 0.53, and Toronto 0.35. What that means is, that in the ALCS, Cleveland scored runs at a clip that was 47 percent lower than the AL average this season, Toronto 65 percent lower. Which seems really bad. But that’s kind of a big table up there. Let’s pull out the teams with the lowest figures in our +/- metric to see how they compare.

So, here we see that Toronto gets a bit of a reprieve: they were only the sixth-worst of ALCS teams, though the only two teams that fared definitively worse than them were the 1983 White Sox and 1990 Red Sox. Interestingly, we find that Cleveland scored the fewest runs relative to their league and still won. Oddly enough, the next-lowest mark to a team that won the ALCS was the 1997 Cleveland club, at 0.61.

What about the whole game? Cleveland and Toronto combined for a paltry four runs per game. How does that stack up with the rest of the AL in terms of runs scored per actual game. This year, the average AL game produced 8.9 total runs, which is actually in the middle of the pack for ALCS years (6.9 in 1972 was the lowest, and 10.8 in 1996 is the highest). So, applying our same methodology, we can look at how the runs per game in the ALCS stacks with the AL from that particular regular season.

For the games on the whole, this was — when adjusted against the average runs scored per game in the regular season — the lowest scoring ALCS in history. Not only that, it was significantly lower than the past 20 seasons. You have to go back to Cleveland vs. Seattle in 1995 to get anywhere near the same low-scoring ALCS.

Runs were most certainly at a premium, even with two of the better offenses in the AL squaring off. It felt historic to me after Game 2 — when I noted that the Blue Jays had scored fewer runs in those first two games than any other previous ALCS competitor — and it certainly ended that way. The two teams didn’t combine for the absolute lowest total of runs scored, but they came close, and when you factor in the regular-season run environment, they scored historically few runs both on an individual team level and at the overall game level. Given the beautiful way Cleveland manager Terry Francona has managed his bullpen, runs may be similarly hard to come by in the Fall Classic.