Introducing the Blyleven

All those 1-0 games

If it feels like there have been a lot of 1-0 games this year … that’s because there have been a lot of 1-0 games* this year. There were two on Sunday (Detroit over Kansas City, Houston over Tampa Bay) and there were two on Saturday (Kansas City over Detroit; Miami over San Francisco).

So far this year, there have been 25 Blylevens, which is an utterly absurd amount when you are barely one-third of the way through the season. In 2024— and remember pitchers dominated last year too — there were only 35 Blylevens all season. Right now, we are on pace for the most 1-0 games in a season since 1968.

You might recall that 1968 was kind of a good year for pitchers.

Of course, there are many fans — particularly Cardinals fans, for some reason — who love a good 1-0 game. This, they will tell you, is baseball at its purest, and for a good while, I could go out on the purity ledge with them. But I have to say: 1-0 games in the era of relievers don’t feel the same to me. If Tarik Skubal had pitched the Tigers’ 1-0 shutout Sunday, oh yeah, you bet, I could get into that.

Instead, it took FIVE Tigers pitchers. The starter, Keider Montero, didn’t even go five. He was followed by Tyler Holton, Chase Lee, Tommy Kahnle and Will Vest. Of those four relievers, only one pitched more than an inning. That was Lee. He pitched 1 1/3 innings.

In Houston’s shutout, at least Hunter Brown was his typical dominant self — he allowed one hit over six innings. But he was followed by three relievers because that’s more or less the law now, and when a team gets shut out by three or four or five pitchers, the 1-0 game feels less like a display of brilliant pitching and more like a sign that, other than Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani and the like, nobody can hit anymore.

That isn’t true — the hitters today are incredible. They’re just being overwhelmed by the sort of pitching stuff that has never been unleashed before.

Well, actually, there is something else, something kind of fascinating to think about in a perverse way. I received an amazing email from Bill James, which I’ll discuss later in the week. One of the points he makes is this: Baseball doesn’t evolve in a straight line upward.

That’s to say that, yes, baseball players do get better over time, the quality of the game gets better over time, there’s little question about any of that.

BUT there are also moments when the game takes a step backward.

The most obvious example of this was World War II. Almost all the best players went to serve, and what was left of the game was minor-league quality at best (with a handful of exceptions). A random team from 1924 or 1914 probably would have destroyed a random team in 1944.

Well, something similar happened to baseball in the early 2000s.

Yeah, that’s right: They started drug testing.

Nobody — and let me be clear here because Bill wants to make this point explicitly — nobody is saying that steroids and HGH and all the PEDs were GOOD for baseball. They very clearly were not for a million reasons. BUT … if we believe that steroids helped turn Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire, and the rest into superhuman players, we have to concede that a team of players on steroids would be able to beat a team of players NOT on steroids. Bill estimates that a steroid team would probably win 70-75% of the time against a non-steroid team.

In this way, it’s pretty clear that hitters WERE better in that era. In 2000, for example, batters hit 25 points higher, slugged 35 points higher and averaged five runs a game. They struck out a lot less and hit a lot more singles, doubles, triples and even home runs. I’ve long been someone who believes the impact of steroids on baseball was overstated … but maybe I was wrong. Maybe hitters NEEDED steroids to keep up.

If you think of it that way, it opens a whole new way to think about the last 15 or so years. You start to think that MLB has spent the last 15 years desperately trying (and mostly failing) to balance the game so that hitters can hold up WITHOUT steroids. They juiced the ball. They mostly eliminated the one-out pitchers. They made extreme shifting illegal. They limited the number of times a pitcher would throw to first. They limited the number of times anyone could visit the mound. They talk about making starters go a certain number of innings. They talk about reducing the number of pitchers each team can carry. And so on. And so on.

All to just get back to that time when MLB looked the other way and let players use whatever performance-enhancing substances they wanted.

You can make too much of this early spate of Blylevens. Maybe as the weather warms up, the runs will start scoring. Heck, the Nationals scored 10 runs the other day before the first out. Maybe that’s a harbinger. Probably not, though. It feels like most hitters are overwhelmed. One run might just be enough.

Raise the Fences? No Thanks!

Our guy Tom Tango puts up a fascinating Twitterex Poll:

Here’s what I think is so interesting about it: Many of us around baseball TALK about how we would love to see the game become more well-rounded — more doubles, more triples, fewer home runs, more action, let’s go!

But when you put it in stark terms — hey, you want more doubles and fewer home runs, all you have to do is raise the fences — people suddenly go “No, wait, I LIKE home runs.”

This gets to the heart, I think, of baseball’s challenge to find the right balance. In football, the goal is always more offense. Always. More touchdowns. More big plays. Sure, some football fans appreciate a good defensive struggle, but the lifeblood of the game is the big play, the dazzling catch, the head-spinning run, the two-minute drive. I suppose the football mavens could overshoot and make it too easy to score, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Virtually every football rule for the last 50 years has sparked more offense, and the fans’ hunger for points seems pretty insatiable.

This is somewhat true for basketball, too. Yes, a lot of people are just OVER the three-point shot because it has become too ubiquitous, but in general, basketball fans can’t get enough scoring, enough triple-doubles, enough 40-point games, enough action.

But baseball must find the balance.

That’s why I say, “Baseball is the best it has been and the best it will ever be when you are 10 years old.” I was 10 years old in 1977, when ballplayers were rail-thin, and home runs were events, and Rod Carew hit .388, and George Foster absolutely blew our minds by hitting 52 home runs. I was 10 years old when starters finished what they started, and the best won 20 games, and you had to be Nolan Ryan to strike out a batter an inning. That’s my baseline. That’s my ideal version of the game. I can’t help it.

If I turned 10 in 1967 or 1987 or 2017, I’d feel differently, I’m sure.

So yeah, I think the game has too many home runs. And yeah, I want to see more doubles and triples. And yeah, I would like to see the incentives change so that hitters try harder to put the ball in play.

But … when I saw Tango’s poll about raising the fences, I thought: No, I don’t want that. OK, it might balance the game a bit more. It might even make baseball (on a surface level) look more like it did in 1977. But to artificially reduce homers? To just take away that sound, that moment of awe,* that glorious feeling of seeing your hometown guy run around the bases? Heck no! Who wants that?

Also, there’s something phony about it. I’m all for Baseball changing rules to keep the game from spiraling — I don’t think they do that enough — but in the end, it’s up to the hitters to stop striking out so much and pitchers to stop giving up so many homers.

Kathleen’s Korner

• ESPN put together this very nice feature with our friend Sarah Langs ahead of Lou Gehrig Day.

  • For a list of local resources and more information about MLB initiatives, you can click here.

  • These awesome t-shirts are also available through RotoWear.

• Pete Croatto shared this incredible antique store find: a photo of Lena Horne throwing out a first pitch at a Negro Leagues exhibition game.

• D.J. Short shared this story from his daughter about why she loved the Mets. Even if you don’t love the Mets, I feel like it captures baseball fanhood pretty well.

• Cole Young made some fun Mariners history as the first player to have a walk-off plate appearance in their MLB debut. Imagine the thrill of being pelted with Dubble Bubble in your career’s biggest moment!