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ShareThisBatting in the New Deadball Era
In 1963, baseball expanded the strike zone. Prior to the '69 season, they lowered the mound. In between from 1963-8 you had eight years of meager offense. Among those players with at least 3000 PA (averaging 3.1 per game for those years), only 7 hit .300. Mighty damn impressive for Clemente to be that far ahead of everyone like that. Only one out of every eight.
In comparison, 31 out of 43 hit .300 from 1925-30. Clemente wouldn't have been in the top third then.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
September 11th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Interesting. I never thought of this, but perhaps the expanded strike zone made Clemente a more valuable player during those years. He was known as a free swinger, so maybe expanding the official zone didn't affect him, as his personal strike zone had always been that big. So he could golf the low pitches or reach the high pitches that most hitters couldn't handle well, and had to take for strikes or just hit weakly. For a few years, his raw numbers were essentially the same as they had been right before 1963. (And then he had that power surge -- I can't remember exactly what happened there, though I'm sure Mike Emeigh has explained it on BTF multiple times.)