Cincinnati Reds and Texas Rangers: The Kings of Whiff

The Cincinnati Reds and Texas Rangers on their way to historically bad offensive seasons.

The Cincinnati Reds and Texas Rangers are on pace to threaten a century-old major-league standard for incompetence.

Both the Reds and Rangers entered play Saturday with .213 team batting averages. The Reds were averaging fewer than six and one-half hits per game, the Rangers about 6.8.

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If either or both finish at that number, it would be the lowest full-season team average in more than a century.

Not since the Dead Ball Era days of 1910 has a team registered worse batting statistics over the course of a full season. That year the Chicago White Sox batted .211 on their way to a sixth-place finish in the American League.

Two seasons earlier the Brooklyn Dodgers batted .213 on their way to a seventh-place finish in the National League.

Not since the pre-DH days of 1968 has a team even approached such levels of offensive incompetence. That year the New York Yankees batted .214. The MLB average that year was .237.

With one week remaining in the strange regular season, the Reds and Rangers aren’t the only two teams making a run at historic offensive ineptitude. The Pittsburgh Pirates are hitting .218.

For comparison, in 2019 the worst full-season batting average was Toronto’s .236. At this point in the season, nine major league teams are batting below .236.

The MLB average is .246, the lowest figure since 1972 when teams hit .244.

Why is this happening? After all, the National League used the DH this year, a move that ought to have raised averages, not lowered them. Yet NL teams are hitting .248, three points lower than in 2019.

Two reasons seem obvious. The first is the shorter 60-game schedule, a necessity that more or less randomized a lot of stats. Given a normal 162 games, it’s entirely possible that averages would eventually return to their ‘normal levels.’

But a second reason argues against that. Both the Reds and Rangers are committed “all or nothing” offensive teams. Those teams adopt high-risk, high-reward offensive strategies. Sometimes the risks outweigh the rewards.

The Reds are an obvious example. They were built for power. Their regular 2020 roster is comprised of players who have struck out nearly once in every four plate appearances.

The tradeoff should be power. The Cincinnati Reds have generated that; they’ve hit 79 home runs in their first 52 games. That’s the seventh-highest total in baseball.

The problem occurs when a Red does NOT hit a home run, which is 95.7 percent of the team’s plate appearances. Reds batters have only 337 total base hits, nine fewer than any other team, and 75 fewer than the MLB average.

If anything, the Texas Rangers are a more extreme illustration of the danger of laying everything on the altar of power. Last year Texas batters hit 223 home runs – that’s 3.6 every 100 plate appearances, basically a league average total – while striking out 25 percent of the time.

So far in 2020, Texas hitters have produced 45 home runs – that’s 2.5 for every 100 plate appearances, while still striking out 25 percent of the time. Meanwhile, their production of non-home run hits is down to 303, about 5.9 per game. That’s nearly a full hit below the MLB average.

Not coincidentally, the Texas Rangers are 18-33 on the season and consigned to last place in the AL West.

The Cincinnati Reds remain alive in the NL race. They are second in the weak NL Central, albeit with only a 26-26 record entering Saturday’s play.

But that has everything to do with Cincinnati’s pitching and little to do with their “hitters.” Although the Reds rank only 29th (fractions ahead of Texas), in batting average, the Reds rank ninth in ERA, good enough to contend in a season in which 16 teams make the playoffs.