It may be my imagination, but I see a lot more breaking balls, and a lot more pitchers with a variety of pitches in their arsenal. Even 5, maybe 10 years ago, a one-pitch pitcher could survive in short outings if that one pitch was good enough, or maybe if they had another lame pitch to go with it – that kind of pitcher has disappeared, I think.

So I agree with Uncle Joe, not with the expansion part, but with the influx of new pitchers who ARE studs because they have changed the approach to pitching. Also, basestealing has gone down over the years, which affected pitcher’s motions (could managers actually be paying attention to sabermetrics? Well, probably not).

I wouldn’t be surprised if offense continues downward for a few years, then goes up again – history shows that happens, anyway. Baseball people are SO conservative when it comes to history. Why isn’t there great rending of garments over baseball circa 1930? or 1968? Both those years were far more deviant from the historical norm than anything we’ve seen in the last 10 years. But the explanations for those prior periods are accepted, and no one posits a grand conspiracy surrounding Bob Gibson or Hack Wilson.

I think the PED thing is a bunch of bunk, all in all, I think it just cancelled itself out, and really affected stats very little. It’s okay, records are allowed to be broken. It’s not like Bonds, Sosa or McGuire hit 150 home runs in a season, or some pitcher could throw 125 mph.

expansion put a strain on pitching and it took years for the quality to catch up with the offense