Hey again, I’m Jon, and we’ve hit the seventh-inning stretch. This is a special, super-sized episode of The History of Charging the Mound, and unlike the others, it’s not about any particular mound-charging. Instead, I decided to call an intermission and take inventory of other once-hallowed baseball institutions that have faded from relevance like mound-charging has.

Something happened around 2010. That’s when mound-charges dropped off suddenly and precipitously. That’s also when players stopped posting ultra-high batting averages, hitting streaks became shorter, light-hitting ballplayers began to phase out, and pitchers would commonly get pulled from a game six or seven innings into a no-hitter. All these practices and achievements have something important in common: they do not perfectly correlate with the winning of baseball games. It seems that the turn of the 2010s was when optimization finally came for baseball.

Although it’s entirely possible that baseball is worse off for it – in at least a couple of ways in particular, I absolutely believe it is – I think the more honest framing is that baseball has entered a phase of accelerated evolution, and it is not finished evolving. Rather than worry too much about all that, though, I decided to have 45 minutes of fun slapping some numbers and charts on the wall.