Baseball's Best Decade (37 page)

Earned Run Averages By Decade

Earned run averages are broken out by league and by decade according to the “best” and the “rest”: the best being the 15 pitchers with the best ERA for the decade, and the rest being the rest of the pitchers without the statistics of the top 15 included.

This approach demonstrates the particularly wide disparity between the best pitchers of the 1920s and 1930s and the rest of the hurlers of those decades. In the American League, there was more than a run difference between the best and the rest in the 1920s and 1930s, a wider gap than for any other decade until the present. In the 1990s and 2000s, there was actually a wider difference in the best and the rest, and this characteristic applies to both leagues in the 2000s, regardless of the presence of the designated hitter in the AL. The smallest difference was 0.66 in the 1980s, though their best pitchers had the third highest ERA of any of the decades.

Did Babe Ruth and George Sisler fatten their batting averages by feasting on the also-rans?
Was the same dynamic true for Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds in the 2000s, and even today?

While the averages tended to be lower, the
National League teams of the 1990s and 2000s also had the largest gap in ERA between the best and the rest … more than a run in the most recent decade. The highest decade ERAs came in the 2000s, the 1990s and the 1950s, the 3 decades when home runs per 9 innings were at their highest. The National League pitchers of the 1960s posted the lowest ERAs across the board, with the ERA of the rest only 0.36 higher than the ERA of the “best” in the 1990s.

When the ERA statistics for both leagues are combined on a decade-by-decade basis, the pitching superiority of the 1960s stands out as sharply as did the batting superiority of the 1920s. The ERA leaders for both leagues posted a combined average of 2.87, a mark rarely achieved today by more than a couple pitchers in either league per season.

It is also interesting to note that the best-hitting decade did not post the highest decade ERA.
The 1920s ended with only the third highest ERA, out-pitching both the 1930s and 1990s that tied with 4.28.

The challenge here is explaining the ERA of the 1970s, just slightly lower than that of the 1940s. The 1970s had the smallest gap between best and rest, with only a 0.72 difference. Given the fact that the changes in the pitching mound and strike zone prior to the 1969 season led to immediately higher batting averages, where did the runs go?

Strikeout Averages By Decade

Just as home runs have increased steadily from one decade to the next, strikeouts have been following a parallel path, both in major league totals (expansion-enhanced since the 1960s) and in strikeout per 9 innings.

In fact, measured per 9 innings, strikeouts more than d
oubled from the 1920s to the 2000s, with the only downturn occurring in the 1970s, which trailed the 1960s by 0.33 strikeouts per 9 innings.

The
Real
Golden Age Must Be …