April Showers Bring May Ignorance

Steroids must be back. That must be it, right? Except, Alex Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro and Barry Bonds are all out of the game at the moment. Maybe pitchers have stopped taking steroids. Maybe that's it.

Or the ball is even more corked than before. No, no, it's the new Yankee Stadium, which forgot the humidor. Or good weather in the East. or was it the West? Or a lack of good pitching. That's always a handy reason.

Yes, the baseball establishment, prompted by baseball "journalism," has been doing its Tasmanian Devil routine to explain the increase in offense this April in comparison to last year. The ex post facto theorizing is an amusing spectacle when you know that people are trying to explain something that doesn't actually exist.

"There have been a lot of pitchers on the disabled list," noted Joe Torre. Curtis Granderson said the balls are juiced. Mike Sciosia postulates that pitchers aren't yet sharp.

They are trying to make sense of a 6.8% increase in runs scored this April and a 17% hike in home runs compared to last year. Batting average is up, ERAs are up, walks are up. They've all skyrocketed to their highest rate in...three years.

That's right, offense is actually down compared to 2006, which was up from '05 which was down from '04 which was up from '03 which was down from '01 and '00. Since the turn of the century, long balls are off 20%, batting average is down seven points and ERAs are more than 30 points better. Since 2001, April's offensive performance have been all over the lot.

What does all this tell us? It tells us a grand total of nada, nil, zilch, zero, bupkus, goose egg and jack. Players, teams and even whole leagues vary in their performance from year to year a few percentage points one way or the other for no particular reason -- or at least for no reason that we can discern. An uptick one year in offense doesn't even guarantee that offense will be up that year, much less suggest a trend.

Let's just say there have been a slew of grand slams this year and note that the Yankees' red zone defense was lacking against Cleveland and Boston. And leave it at that.

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