This article wound up in a rather different place than where it started.   All I was originally doing here was trying to check out the standard deviation of walks over time.   This arose in regard to a comment made by a reader in a “Hey, Bill” letter on June 13:

Hey Bill, About my earlier question about low average/low power/high walk players like Joost, Bishop, Yost, etc.. . .it just seemed to me that because these type of players were employed and enjoyed decently-lengthed careers, that somebody must have seen the value in them. I've always been fascinated with those players because you just don't seem to see them these days.
Asked by: freejju

It seemed to me

a) that this is probably true, that we don’t have these kind of players anymore, and

b) that if this is true, it would imply that the standard deviation of walks by regular players must have declined.

To figure the standard deviation of walks for regular players, you first have to decide what is a “regular” player, over time.   I decided to treat any player with 450 or more plate appearances as a “regular” player.   Obviously there would be different standards for the strike years, but it would be inappropriate to include those years in a study of this particular question.

Once I had the data organized to figure the standard deviation of walks for each generation of players, it occured to me that I needed to figure the average as well as the standard deviation.   Once I had done that, it occured to me that it was just a short step to figure all of the other averages as well—average doubles, triples, home runs, RBI, etc.—and once I had done that, I decided that that was more interesting than the original question, and I should write up the data.

OK, starting with the original question. . .the standard deviation of walks by regular players did decrease quite significantly from the 1950s through the 1980s.   This is the norm and standard deviation of walks by regular players for each decade starting in 1910:

1910-1919                   837                  48                    20

1920-1929                   939                  49                    21

1930-1939                   961                  53                    23

1940-1949                   907                  58                    25

1950-1959                   897                  58                    23

1960-1969                 1138                  51                    21

1970-1979                 1498                  53                    22

1980-1989                 1443                  52                    21

1990-1999                 1566                  56                    23

2000-2007                 1508                  53                    24

A “standard deviation”, if any of you missed that, is a measure of the spread among a group of numbers.    If we take two groups of numbers, the first group 22, 19, 21, 21, 17 and the second group  26, 34, 11,  5, 24, both groups average 20, but the standard deviation of the second group is much greater than the standard deviation of the first. 

Comparing 1940s baseball to baseball today, the average walks for a regular were higher then and the standard deviation was larger, so that there were certainly more “walk specialists” in 1940s baseball than there are now.    Another fact:  in 1940s baseball there were 160 teams, and there 32 players who drew 100 or more walks but did not hit 20 home runs.   From 2007 to 2007 there have been 240 teams, but there have been only five players who drew 100 walks but did not hit 20 home runs. 

The number of walks for a typical player, interestingly enough, has not really changed much over the course of the century.   Actually, most things in a typical player’s record have not changed that much over the years.   Most things have changed a little and a few things have changed a lot, but there’s a good deal of consistency in an average player’s record, over the last hundred years.   Let’s start with the 837 players who were regulars from 1910 to 1919.  Actually, I didn’t count any players whose official strikeout count was zero.   A lot of the early leagues didn’t count strikeouts by hitters, and I eliminated from the data any players for whom I didn’t have strikeout data, otherwise included everybody with 450 plate appearances:

A typical player in that era hit .274 with 3 homers, 55 RBI, but 21 stolen bases.   The lively ball era started in 1920, so the players from the next generation struck out less and hit more homers, and, for that matter, more of everything. 

                The average regular in the 1920s was a .300 hitter, and struck out only 33 times per season.   Runs scored, doubles, triples and homers all were up sharply in the 1920s, while stolen bases fell sharply.  As runs become easier to come back, it makes less sense to risk a baserunner in a stolen base attempt.

            Strikeouts, after setting a historic low water mark in the 1920s, began to increase in the 1930s, and have increased in almost every decade since then:

Stolen bases continued to decline, power continued to increase, but average overall offensive production in the 1930s was very, very similar to what it had been in the 1920s.  

During World War II (1941-1945) there was a shortage of rubber, which effected the construction of the baseball, as there was a rubber lining around the cork center of a baseball.   The wartime baseballs were dead, and hitting numbers were way down.   In addition to that night baseball—a novelty in the late 1930s—became much more common during and just after World War II, and the early stadiums had poor lighting.  This made the 1940s, by the standards of the previous decades, a pitcher’s era:

Strikeouts increased a little, doubles and triples levelled off, and runs scored and OPS dropped off.   Home runs as a percentage of hits increased in the 1940s as they had increased in the 1920s and 1930s, but not merely as much as they increased in the 1950s:

The 1950s were the decade of Gus Zernial.   Gus Zernial, Hank Sauer, Wally Post, Del Ennis, Vic Wertz, RoySievers, Rocky Colavito.   The slow, .260-hitting power hitter.   Every team had one.   Strikeouts, increasing constantly since 1930, increased rapidly, though not as rapidly as they would in the 1960s.   Home run rates vaulted to a level that would not be surpassed until the 1990s.   Stolen bases hit an all-time low, the average player stealing only six bases a season. 

Missing the right transitional sentence. ..this is the data for the 1960s:

The average player from the 1960s, in fact, looks astonishingly like the average player from the 1950s. .. strikeouts up, batting average off ten points, walks down a little bit, but on the whole very much the same. 

We remember the 1960s as the pitcher’s decade, the decade of Koufax and Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA and Don Drysdale’s shutout string.   What we sometimes forget is that the 1963 re-definition of the strike zone was in reaction to what was perceived as excessive slugging in 1961-1962, Maris breaking the home run record, Tommy Davis driving in 153 runs in 1962.   Adding in 1960, which was really the last season of the 1950s, and 1969, which was post-restoration of the strike zone, there are four “normal” seasons in there, with six “pitchers’” seasons.  

In the 1970s, with a little less power, the speed came back into the game in a meaningful way:

Batting averages were higher than they had been since the ‘30s, and power was down for one of the few times in baseball history—but overall offense was essentially no higher in the 1970s than it had been in the 1960s.   The average regular in the 1960s scored 70 runs, drove in 65, and had a .750 OPS.   In the 1970s the averages were almost exactly the same.   The introduction of the Designated Hitter made more regulars per team (in the American League), and thus helped created the impression that it was more of a hitters’ decade.

And nothing changed in the 1980s:

The average player in the 1980s looks exactly like the average player from the 1970s—more so than for any other decade.    The Home Run to Stolen Base Ratio, which had gone from 3 to 21 in the teens to 15 to 6 in the fifties now tilted back to even, at 14 each.

In the 1990s, of course, offense exploded:

And this has continued into our own dumb century:

Although the really big numbers were at the start of the decade, and the numbers have declined slowly since 2000.   By decade’s end the 2000-2009 averages will be close to 1990-1999.  

Running the decades together so you can see the trends more clearly:

You may also wish to note that there is basically no increase in games played or at bats by an average regular connected with the lengthening of the schedule in the 1960s.  The small increase in games played and at bats in recent years is probably caused by the expansion of the bullpens, which shrinks the benches—but the high-water mark for at bats remains the 1930s.  Summarizing the trends:

            Runs and RBI peaked about 1930, dropped until 1968, have gone up since 1968.

            Batting averages have been fairly constant except for a blip in the era between the Wars.

            Doubles have been fairly constant throughout the century.

            Triples have declined steadily and constantly throughout the century.

            Power and strikeouts have increased steadily throughout the century.

            Walks have changed very little.  

            It would appear, then, that unless something changes, the typical player in another 40 or 50 years will hit 30 home runs and strike out 125 times a season, but might hit only 1 triple a year.    Let me ask a few questions:

            How do you feel about that?

            If you could take action to reverse this trend, would you do so?

            Do you believe that the trend, if unchecked, will continue for another 40 years (as it has for the past 100), or do you believe that we are near a historic watershed where power may begin to decrease?

            A few notes about the standard deviations of these norms.   In 1910-1919 and 1920-1929, the standard deviation of home runs (among regular players) was greater than the norm.   In the teens, when the norm was 3, the standard deviation was 4, and in the twenties, when the norm was 7, the standard deviation was 8. 

            Since 1930 the standard deviation of home runs by regulars has hovered at about 10 or 11.  

            The standard deviation of batting average has always been about 10% of batting average, although this has contracted slightly over the century.   In the 1920s the standard deviation of batting average was 34 points.  In our own decade it has been 27 points.   It has been 27 to 29 points in each decade since the 1940s.

            The standard deviation of walks, as noted earlier, did decrease beginning in the 1960s, but has gone back up in recent years.

            In the 1910s, when the average strikeout total was 43, the standard deviation was 17.  From 2000-2007, when the average is 90, the standard deviation is 30.

            In the teens, twenties and thirties the standard deviation of stolen base totals was always less than the average.   Since 1940, however, the standard deviation of stolen bases has always been larger than the average—meaning that base stealing has become essentially a specialty.   If everybody steals 10 bases the standard deviation is low; if three guys steal no bases but one guy steals 40, the standard deviation is high.   The standard deviation of stolen bases is high because base stealing is a specialty.

            It is likely that changes in the standard deviations of a performance category would predict changes in the norm at some level and in some way, but understanding that would be

            a) complicated, and

            b) unreliable (as a predictor). 

            Look at what has happened to the number of times per season an average player is hit by a pitch:

            After being nearly constant for many years this number has basically doubled in the last two decades, as more and more players have tended to hang out over the plate and try to drive the outside pitch.   There have also been significant changes in the average regular’s age and his listed weight:

            Hey, I’m right in step with baseball!   I’ve gotten older and heavier, too.