On the other hand, Major League Baseball at the moment has the lowest league-wide batting average of all time, .232, at the same time it is taking longer to play a game than almost any other season in history. Maybe the hitting will heat up with the weather, but no other sport would tolerate less action and taking more time for nothing to happen. The combination of these two is unprecedented in baseball history. In notoriously punchless 1968 (.237), the games were half-an-hour shorter and I’m sure they were much shorter in 1888 (.239).
Meanwhile, hockey is enjoying a highly enjoyable scoring renaissance because the league tweaked the rules, and the norms developed to make it less boring (what a concept):
You combine the skill level and speed with the talented and brash modern-day player and the fact that the rules have changed dramatically since the 2004-05 lockout — the league has successfully eradicated the hard-to-watch clutching and grabbing of the mid to late 90s and early 2000s and largely eliminated those frightening neutral-zone and offensive-blue-line elbows and shoulders to the head — and the NHL has turned into one entertaining, skilled, fast, high-scoring league . . .
This is a new age in the NHL, a far cry from the dead puck era that saw a sharp decline in goal scoring from the 1980s. In 1980-81, teams averaged 4.01 goals per game. In the decade, there was never a year below 3.67 goals per game.
By 2003-04, goals per game fell to 2.57 — the lowest in a half-century.
This season, teams are averaging 3.09 goals per game, the highest average since 1995-96, when it was 3.14 per game. The league-wide save percentage of .907 is the lowest since 2006-07 (.905). The average penalty kill is 79 percent, which is frankly unbelievable. The average power play is 21 percent. As Edmonton Oilers coach Jay Woodcroft notes, “It wasn’t that long ago when if you had a 19, 20 percent power play, you were in the top five in the National Hockey League.”
The Florida Panthers are averaging 4.17 goals per game, the highest by a team since the Pittsburgh Penguins averaged 4.41 per game in 1995-96.
We’re Americans — we like offense and we have limited attention spans. Baseball should adjust accordingly.