MLB Teams Bucking League-Wide Trends

MLB has been in an interesting place over the past few years. The growth of statistical data has been exponential, with new and (hopefully) improved metrics hitting the open market each and every season.

One has to imagine the proprietary data that MLB teams make sure to keep private is even more advanced and potentially nuanced.

With this wealth of data, league-wide trends seem to be headed further and further to extremes. Nearly every team is telling their hitters to sell out for power and their pitchers to go hard after hitters to get the strikeout. Starting pitchers are being pulled earlier in games than ever before and defenses are being moved around before seemingly every at bat.

The league as a whole looks vastly different than not only the 1980s, but even 2010. With the vast majority of these changes, the results have been positive and so the league has shifted (no pun intended) to mimic these new tendencies.

However, we all know history is cyclical and, to quote Meredith Grey, “just when we think we figured things out, the universe throws us a curveball” or maybe, in this case, a heavy sinker. So which teams are bucking the league-wide trends in 2017? Which teams are going for contact over power? Which teams are running the bases like it’s the 1980s all over again?

Let’s take a look at some of those teams, with the necessary caveat that it is still early in the 2017 season, and some of this “rogue nature” of raging against the machine might simply be noise from a 20-game sample to start the year. We’ll also check to see whether these teams are having any success by going against the grain.