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To the extent that I have a concern about the 2025 season, it’s in that big drop in BABIP (.291 to .281) and the ongoing loss of hits on balls in play. It matches my observation, which is that the ongoing evolution of pitchers into witches, and the more recent trends of teams both optimizing defensive positioning and selecting for fielding skill over batting, are all choking off routes to scoring that aren’t home runs.
So far this year, 42% of runs have been scored on home runs. I can’t chop that down for the first ten days of a season, but I can tell you that figure was 37% last March and April, and 39% in March and April of 2023. I can tell you that there have been just three seasons in history in which that number has gone above 42%, all of which were much higher scoring (2017, 2019, and 2021) than the early days of 2025 are.
