Introduction

I have chosen to visualize datasets of the already included package Lahman and imported a .csv text file of American and National League pitching data over the couple centuries to make another visualization. Through my visualizations, I specifically looked into the factors and results of the three true outcomes and gave a little insight into how those outcomes broke down among the National League of the most recent season, 2020.

Three true outcome is a term in baseball that refers to the outcomes during an at bat that does not involve the defense. These outcomes are home runs, walks, and strikeouts. Walks and strikeouts are the two outcomes that do not involve runs or improve any offensive statistics. Major League Baseball currently has an increase in all of these categories, with some saying it is making the game more less enjoyable to watch. To see how exactly these trends have been progressing, I have compared walks to strikeouts over multiple angles and perspectives, while simultaneously, looking into the most recent season in the Lahman package (2020) to see how these outcomes affected the National League as they had the ultimate champions, Los Angeles Dodgers.

Strikeout V. Walk Ratio and Correlation (2020)

Though the 2020 season was shortened due to the pandemic, the outcome stayed true to the trend. The American League and National League have very little differences when it comes to the correlation of walks and strikeouts when the graphs are faceted. An important thing to note here is that out of the 60 games every team played, 20 of them were “interleague games”, meaning it was a match between an American League team versus a National League team. Therefore, these graphs account for a third of the matches played for all teams, still showing that the trend stays nearly the same no matter the opponent. This also allows for readers to see that the outliers represent the season’s Cy Young winners or candidates. The Cy Young award goes to the best pitcher of each league, it is very likely that their rate for strikeouts were very high with low walk rates.

After observing strikeouts v. walks by each player across both leagues combined and independently, we look at the ratio across all 30 teams in the league. Note that this is for the 2020 season, this gives early insight as to how strikeout to walk ratio might have affected winning vs. losing teams. The winner this season, the Los Angeles Dodgers (LAN), does not have the best statistic when it comes to strikeouts. However, they are the best team at not giving out walks by a significant margin. This offers few insight as to what worked well for them this season. To compare the other teams, the world series opponent for the Dodgers were the Tampa Bay Rays (TBA) and they also had a very low walk ratio to strikeouts. On the contrary, some of the teams that struggled were the Colorado Rockies (COL) and the Miami Marlins(MIA), though Colorado is almost seen as an outlier.

Strikeout per Team Game Throughout the Years

This graphic is a very interesting model that shows a visual trend of strikeouts per team game throughout the years. As the NL has more data in the early years all the way from 1876, there is a major spike until 1900. From 1900 and onward, the two leagues have a rather similar model and also happens to follow the trend together. There is an interesting dip at around 1980 in strikeouts which is the first time in the modern era where the strikeout numbers went down. Some things that could explain this trend was the introduction of the Steroid Era, bolstering overall hitting numbers around that decade. One very small detail is that NL regularly has a higher strikeout per team game since around 1970. One big note for that would be that there is no designated hitter, but rather a pitcher hitting in the ninth spot of the lineup. Usually, their strikeout percentage is significantly higher than the designated hitter as the DH is a position for batters to hit without playing defense in a game.

Strikeouts/Walks/Home Runs Drawn and Hit by Batters (2020)

These three plots’ main objective is to show the batters’ perspective from all of the National League teams. While pitching is one metric, hitting is another perspective into how the three true outcome plays in the modern game today. This one includes the third and final metric of the three true outcome, Home Runs, and it is rather a decisive metric. Going back to the winner of the season, the Dodgers, they hit a total of 118 home runs as a team, 15 more than the second highest home run hitting team in the Atlanta Braves. The Dodgers also do well in both the walk and strikeout categories. They were the third lowest in the NL when it came to striking out and fourth highest when it came to drawing walks as a collective unit.

Conclusion

Focusing on the three true outcomes, there were two main angles to go about how these outcomes affected the winner of the most recent World Series: pitching and hitting. From the raw data itself, what seems to define a “good” team versus a “bad” team is the teams’ ability to not only hit and produce runs, but limit themselves form striking out too many times and also the pitchers being able to strike out a lot of the opposing batters while not giving up free passes in walks. To look into the history of the most famous pitching statistic, strikeouts, the timeline of the average strikeout per game over the majority of the sport’s history offered insight into exactly when this trend began. These visualizations support each other in that it is slowly shaping not only how every team plays, but also dictates which teams will go far in the year and which teams will struggle if the batters strike out and cannot draw walks or the pitchers cannot strike people out and constantly give home runs and walks. This is demonstrated in the last visual across the 15 teams in the National League and we expect to see similar numbers in terms of the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League.