Quote:
Originally Posted by luckymann
That 1987 AL race is on my list of candidates for Anatomy of a Season at some point.
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It was a fascinating season, for more reasons than that race. You have the Blue Jays and Seattle entering in 1977. The MLB R/G rate jumps from 3.99 in 1976 to 4.47 in 1977. Perfectly explicable with the thinner pitching pool. Then, it drops to 4.10, and back up to 4.46 in 1979. Still explicable due to a ripple effect caused by the expansion, and what it did to the pitching. The league was unstable. 9 year old me knew it, as he watched his team lose 109 games, and invent new ways of going about it every day.
Take out the strike year of 1981, and its 4.00 R/G because the work stoppage messed with everything related to the game. It was not a normal year, and it showed. Look at 1980, 1982, 1983 (when it started to be fun to be a Blue Jays' fan, for the first time in our existence), 1984, and 1985 (sooo much fun). 4.29, 4.30, 4.31, 4.26, and 4.33. Straight as a string stability. The pitching pool had recovered. Little jump to 4.41 in 1986, and then...What in the hell? 4.72, seemingly out of the blue in 1987, and then it plummets to 4.14 in 1988, and pretty much stabilizes, until 1993, when guys are "filling out their uniforms" better, and hitting absolute tanks, and two teams are added in Denver, and Miami, to water down the pitching. Two more follow five years later, in Tampa, and Phoenix to completely dilute the pitching pool.
We now know some of what was going on from 1993 forward, but how do you explain 1987's isolated offensive explosion? Were they experimenting with the baseballs, and then went...Whoa!...Whoa!..Whoa!...That's a bit too much...Let's turn it down a notch, and went too far the other way? I mean, it was more than just a blip, and then it was gone, seemingly without a trace.
There hadn't been a run rate that high, since 1950, and there wouldn't be again, until 1994.
Same thing with the HR rate. Blue Jays, and Seattle arrive, it goes from 0.58 HR/G to 0.87 HR/G. Shallow pitching pool. To be expected. Going forward, it stayed in the 0.75 to 0.85 HR/G area. 1986: up a bit to 0.91, 1987: 1.06!, 1988-1992: 0.76, 0.73, 0.79, 0.80, and 0.72, before it starts surging in 1993. How do you explain that? My Jays set the record for HR in a single game (a record that has withstood the crazyball era, and the launch angle era so far), with 10, against the Orioles, in September of 1987. What. The. Hell? We've all seen eras, and trends throughout the history of baseball, but how many "island seasons" have we seen? I'd love to know what really happened, because the numbers are completely wonked, when you look at 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988. Very steep, and jagged. Very interesting, and head scratching year.