Something Weird is Happening with MLB Hitting

Nerd alert. You have been warned.

Something weird is going with with MLB hitters. I don’t know what is causing it, but I think I’ve at least measured what is going on.

You already knew that MLB had an offense problem. The average hitter has barely broken a .700 OPS over the last few years, including hitting a new low in 2025.

Yet, Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, and a few others have been putting up some of the best single-season performances ever. Even when we dig a little deeper, we see a healthy number of guys putting up batting lines that would be MVP-level performances a few years ago, like Vlad Guerrero’s hitting .323/.396/.544 or Bryce Harper at .285/.373/.525 in 2024.

To put it another way: 2016 was a similar overall offensive year overall as 2024. But, the distribution of talent was way different; 38 qualified players posted a wRC+ over 120 in 2016 while 51 did it in 2024. Conversely, more qualified players were below average in 2024 than in 2016.

Let’s visualize the change. Here is a comparison between all qualified hitters in the two years as a histogram:

The blue bars represent the proportion of qualified hitters with a wRC+ in that bin. The red line represents where the bars should be if the distribution was Normal. If the blue bar is below the line, there are fewer hitters in that bin than you would expect from a Normal distribution.

We should expect hitters to follow a Normal distribution. Hundreds of little traits make a hitter good or bad—plate discipline, power, speed, swing path, athleticism, guessing ability, umpire relations, ability to see a slider, etc. Just as if we rolled hundreds of dice, if traits are each randomly assigned to a player and basically independent of each other, they should produce a pretty Normal distribution.

The difference between the two years is subtle**, but important. In 2024, a lot fewer hitters are in the 105-120 wRC+ range (think .750ish OPS). A handful of of those missing hitters shifted toward the elite end of the spectrum. but most moved down into the average (~.710-.730 OPS in 2024) range. Basically, 2024 is significantly more stars-and-scrubs when compared with 2016.

Basically, the 2022-2025 Yankees lineups is typical of major league hitters generally, with a few players posting elite numbers and a lot of guys hovering at or below a .700 OPS:

Here’s what the distributions look like since 1990:

Okay, I concede that an untrained eye may not see the difference. I look at these distributions for a living, so the right side of the 2023-2024 figures stood out to me as weird.

We can measure the calculate the shape of a distribution using something called an LK score. A stars-and-scrubs distribution is what we call leptokurtic, or concentrated in the peaks and tails with relatively little in the shoulders. A normal distribution has an LK score around .120. Here’s what that metric looks like since 1990:

That’s a pretty big shift! We won’t know if 2025 will follow the trend for a bit.

So what is going on? What changed in 2023-2024 to make a lot of above average baseball hitters worse and a handful of them much better?

I don’t have any answers. MLB’s rule changes coincided with the shift, but I have a hard time thinking about how the pitch clock could plausibly create this distribution. There are some small changes after 2022 in the percentage of pitchers that are sliders or cutters and a small increase in fastball velocity, but nothing else stands out.

What do you all think? Theories?