The quiet scourge of the foul ball
It isn't a plague conspicuous enough to generate headlines or raise much alarm, but its constant drip affects areas of the game that concern MLB officials: pace of play, the number of balls in play, and pitchers' health.
The issue? Foul balls and their ever-increasing numbers.
Throughout baseball history (at least since pitch-level data began to be recorded in 1988), balls hit in play outnumbered foul balls - until 2017.
The trend of more balls being hit out of play than within the white lines has continued every year since, with an increasing spread after they first crossed seven seasons ago.
Overall, foul balls comprise nearly one-fifth of all pitches thrown, advancing from 16.3% in 1998 to 18.3% last season.
There were 129,954 foul balls hit last season in total, trailing only 2019 (which had the most total pitches thrown on record because of the elevated run-scoring environment).
For context, there were more than 15,000 additional foul balls last season than in 1998, the first year there were 30 MLB teams. That's a 14% rise in foul balls even though total pitches thrown has only grown by 1.6%.
One positive: a lot more souvenirs for fans.
But there's also more wasted time when pace of play is a focus of the league office.
In 1998, 41.6% of all strikes were whiffs and fouls. That combined percentage didn't exceed 42% until 2008. Last season, fouls and whiffs combined for 47.3% of all strikes.
Because foul balls can't count as third strikes, they contribute to more exertion from pitchers at a time when their elbows and shoulders are already struggling to remain intact.
Pitchers are throwing near max effort more than ever, as theScore studied, and now they're forced to throw more wasted pitches.
For a pitcher like Ross Stripling, foul balls test him in multiple ways.
"I think about (extended plate appearances) all the time," Stripling says. "For me, as a guy who doesn't generate a lot of swing and miss, I'm usually featuring my best stuff from the start. I'll throw my two-strike curveball to the leadoff hitter in the first inning if I have to. I'm not in the business of saving my best pitch until the third time through like some guys do.
"So, if I'm facing, let's say, Juan Soto, and I threw him my kitchen sink in the first at-bat, and he has a 10- or 11-pitch plate appearance and has fouled off my best cutter, my best changeup, and he spit on a curveball in the dirt, his second time at bat I'm already like: 'Shit.'
Stripling added: "Other guys might have a different mentality as far as, 'This guy's annoying. My pitch count's getting higher.' Mine is more, 'I've thrown this guy my best bullets, and I didn't get him out. Inevitably, when I face him a second and third time, he's seen my best stuff. And that's not an advantage for me.'"
Chicago Cubs pitcher Jameson Taillon says he tries not to let long at-bats fueled by foul balls bother him. But one game sticks out in his memory: Aug. 27, 2017, against Cincinnati. He specifically recalls three plate appearances against Joey Votto.
Taillon got ahead of Votto in all three meetings that day. But the result of those confrontations was three walks, 31 pitches, and 15 foul balls.
- Plate appearance No. 1: 11 pitches, six fouls
- No. 2: 11 pitches, six fouls
- No. 3: nine pitches, three fouls
"That ruined my day," Taillon says. "That was the art of intentionally fouling pitches off. He was 100% (doing that). He was taking pitches out of the catcher's glove. Sometimes the hitter will do it on purpose if they're not seeing the ball well. Fight. Stay alive. Then there are other times you take your chances with some bigger swings."
He allowed one earned run on the day but lasted only four innings (plus two batters in the fifth) because Votto kept spoiling pitches. Votto was Taillon's last batter after 111 pitches thrown.
Taillon said he often speaks with position-player teammates during games to understand their thoughts about when they might be intentionally trying to spoil a pitch or are simply struggling to square a pitcher up.
"Those conversations still do happen where hitters are like, 'I'm just trying to protect and foul off anything that is down and away because he does that so well,'" Taillon says. "There's that, and then the quality of stuff is so good it's hard to be perfectly on time."
Regularly spoiling pitches is a skill, and some batters are better at it than others. But the primary reason for the rise in fouls is likely the quality of stuff pitchers throw.
Pitching velocity reaches record levels each year, and more arms enter each season with new designer breaking balls and off-speed pitches.
Pitchers' added velocity and spin are correlated with the rise in days on the IL.
In MLB's first comprehensive report on the pitching injury epidemic released in December, experts stated that rule changes were the only way they saw to reverse the injury trend.
MLB's focus to date is on potential rule alterations that would aim to reduce velocity and max-effort throwing by incentivizing longer outings.
But perhaps the foul ball is another area to explore. Strike rules have evolved over time, but they haven't changed in more than a century.
In 1845, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club created the rule that three strikes equal an out, though they had to be swinging strikes.
The called strike didn't arrive until 1858, and foul balls weren't credited as strikes until 1901 in the National League and 1903 in the American League, in response to skilled batters spoiling pitches to force walks.
Rule makers then thought the balance between batters and pitchers had gotten out of whack regarding fouls. Has it reached that point again?
If rules were created from scratch today, it'd be a bit odd to conceive of a foul ball as a strike in situations with zero and one strike while allowing batters an infinite number of chances to waste pitches once they're at two strikes.
MLB's product is its best when games feature less dead time, and when its best pitchers are healthy. After more than 100 years, perhaps it's time to revisit the foul ball.
Travis Sawchik is theScore's senior baseball writer.