Generously leaving aside that he played in the steroid era, and how that certainly affects a lot of what he's talking about, I thought it might be interesting to look at stats going back a few decades and see how accurate his take is and what other interesting stuff might show up.The four-time World Series champ believes the game has become way too obsessed with advanced stats and systems that, in his eyes, have sucked the spontaneity right out of baseball. Posada didn't mince words, saying, "The baseball they play today is garbage"—a comment that instantly went viral among fans and analysts alike.
The legendary Yankees catcher explained that he misses the days when putting the ball in play, moving runners over, and avoiding strikeouts were the name of the game. He recalled that during his career, striking out 100 times in a season was considered a disaster for any hitter, no matter how much power they had.
For Posada, the offensive philosophy has done a complete 180. These days, he says, you see players hitting around .200, racking up strikeouts like it's going out of style, and still landing multi-million dollar contracts just because they can hit home runs. That, he says, is a world away from the generation that brought four titles to New York.
Full screen shot (spoilered for size) with a heat map option enabled so you can easily see where the extremes are:
He's basically right about strikeouts going up, which isn't a big surprise. I was a bit surprised about the timespan it's increased over though. K% has very gradually gone up going back to a brief stable period from 1978 to 1981. From 12.5% in '81 up to a (full season) peak of 23.2% in 2021.
If you zoom out even further than this, the general trend is just increasing K% going all the way back to 1925. Some periods of regression, stagnation, correction, and acceleration, but generally it just continues to go up.
1925 - 6.9%
1935 - 8.3%
1945 - 8.5%
1955 - 11.4%
1965 - 15.7%
1975 - 13%
1985 - 14%
1995 - 16.2%
2005 - 16.4%
2015 - 20.4%
2025 - 22.2%
He's right about sacrifice hits relative to his era, but it's interesting how deeply they bottomed out in 2022 and this year they're already close to that number. Sac flies haven't really changed much at all.
Average and OBP are down relative to when Posada played, but in that case the game has clearly gone through some ebbs and flows - again before the mound change looks very similar to the last decade. But also again from 1988 to 1992. At least in the period shown here, AVG peaked about 4 years into Posada's career.
Lots of other noticeable trends since 2000 - triples are way down since then, doubles down somewhat, GDPs are down.
I don't know what he's talking about with 100Ks being a disaster. He broke that himself several times. So did Jeter, Soriano, Arod, etc... The Yankees had 5 guys over 100Ks in 2002. Not that it wasn't often frustrating watching Edmonds K pretty often, but nobody would've called his 100K seasons here disasters.
