It's early yet. Temperatures have been at or below freezing for some April games. And we still don't know what impact the new baseball -- supposedly, less tightly wound and thus, less likely to travel as far — will have.
But one thing we do already know: baseball's offense is in crisis. Entering Saturday, the game-wide league average was a mere .233, which, if it's maintained, would be one of the lowest figures since the Dead Ball Era. Homers are also down, though as previously noted, that could be more weather-related.
If, however, the offensive drought continues, teams will need to find solutions, a way to combat the diminishing numbers. What will happen if teams can't rely on homers as their principal offensive currency? If strikeouts continue to skyrocket and contact is at a premium, how will teams compensate?
The game is ultimately cyclical. And just as new rules are being experimented with at the minor league level in an effort to bolster offense in the game, teams may not wait around for those to be implemented at the major league level and seek their own internal solutions.
Could that result in teams abandoning the all-or-nothing offensive approach at the plate and returning to a play-for-one-run philosophy? And eventually, could that mean the return of -- yikes! -- the bunt?
Consider that Red Sox manager Alex Cora had his team out on the Fenway lawn early Friday afternoon practicing that lost art.
That's quite an abrupt change from the 2018 season, when Cora's offensive philosophy was neatly summarized by a two-word credo: Do Damage.
Which the Sox did, over and over again, leading the game in runs scored, OPS and total bases. But across the game, the numbers continue to trend downward.
“I do believe the game is changing,” Cora said. “I don’t know if it’s the weather or the baseball, but it’s not playing like it was playing in '19 the last time I managed. We might break my own record as a manager bunting this season. I believe there are a few things we have to do different this year offensively, and that’s why the guys are out there bunting.”
But if the ball, cold weather and precise attack plans by opposing pitchers are so limiting scoring chances, alternatives have to be unearthed.
"You can’t add on just swinging the bats,” Cora said. “If we have a chance to advance the runners and play for one, we’ll do it. It’s something you have to have in the back pocket. There are certain situations you should bunt,” Cora said. “There are certain situations a ground ball to second is going to win you a game.''
For the better part of the last 20 years, the bunt (and other strategies that don't revolve around pounding the ball into submission) have gone completely out of fashion in the game. The few holdovers who still played small ball -- like former Kansas City manager Ned Yost -- were ceaselessly mocked. There was data to show outs were simply too precious to throw away, and those in the analytic community weren't shy about publicizing it.
Necessity being the mother of invention and all that, you may see the idea of small ball creep back into the game.
Cora's boss, Chaim Bloom, is open to whatever works, but first wants to be convinced that what we've seen to date this season is not the product of a small sample size or otherwise aberrational.
"I do think we do need to take some time to make sure that these trends actually do continue and that we have confidence that this is where things are going,'' Bloom said.
But beyond those precautions, Bloom said there's another issue at work here.
"At a time when fewer runs are being scored, it definitely makes sense to play for one run,'' he said. "But I think the key is contact. If we're in a low-contact environment, a lot of those 'small ball' strategies just aren't going to have the same payoff. We need an environment where there's a lot of contact, and there's more singles, basically, to validate a lot of those strategies. I actually think that would be a pretty entertaining environment; I think the game is better when there's a wide variety of strategies you can use to score runs and there's a lot of different ways to build your team.
"But if we don't have a game where the ball is being put in pay, it's hard to say a lot of those things are really going to have the payoff that we want them to have. If most of the action is coming in the form of extra-base hits, it just doesn't make sense to play to move a guy up one base if there's not a lot of guys being put in play. If you don't have confidence that there's going to be a ball in play, it doesn't make sense to try to move guys up incrementally.''
If it gets to the point where changes are being made wholesale and we start seeing the game more like it was played in the 1980s and 1990s, Bloom believes even the generation of managers and executives who've come of age in the analytics era would willingly abandon their bias against bunting and small ball.
"I think the beauty of evidence-based thinking,'' said Bloom, "is that if the evidence is telling you that those strategies are good, anyone who's rooted in evidence-based thought is going to be the first to change their minds. A lot of the new conventional thinking about not bunting, which I don't think is as dogmatic as people make it out to be, is rooted in the evidence that suggests that it's not the best way to win ballgames. And if that changes, I think it's going to be easy for people to change their mind.
"Whatever strategies correlate with run-scoring and correlate with winning I think you're going to see teams move to embrace.''
There's one more potential pitfall: if teams, indeed, come to the conclusion that they're going to move runners and do the little things, some instruction will be in order. An entire generation of players has grown up without learning how to bunt the ball and they have some catching up to do.
"Sometimes, it's not that you don't want to bunt (as a manager),'' said Cora. "It's 'Can he get it done?' You might be better off letting him swing the bat. And it goes deeper than professional baseball. It goes to youth baseball and showcase baseball. In showcase baseball, it's run fast, hit it far and throw hard. You don't play the game. It's not about winning games; it's about showcasing your skills.
"There are certain situations where you should bunt, certain situations where it's going to win you a game. We're not (teaching) that in youth baseball. When you get to college, maybe you learn. But it's something we have to pay attention to. And maybe some teams are going to make adjustments and starting playing 'small ball.'"
___________________
______________________