Baseball is becoming increasingly a game of all or nothing hitting.
In 2018, 25% of runs scored were home runs.
In 2018, 13% of hits were home runs.
In 2018 there were 41,207 strikeouts, topping last year’s 40,104.
For the 2018 season there were more strikeouts than hits for the first time in baseball history, 41,207 strikeouts, 41,019 hits.
There were 6,105 home runs in both leagues last year, a record.
Since the year 2000, there have been 97,343 home runs.
The contact hitter is becoming a thing of the past. (Though the 2018 Red Sox are a refreshing exception, or so it seems to me.)
Joe Sewell is the best contact hitter of all time.
Joe Sewell struck out 114 times in his entire career! In 1925 in 608 at bats he struck out all of 4 times. Sewell holds the record for the lowest strikeout rate in major league history, striking out on average only once every 62.5 at-bats, and the most consecutive games without a strikeout, at 115.
Even Babe Ruth never struck out over 100 times in a season.
Link below are stats for the 2018 season:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2018.shtml
And yet, when I add in home runs TWICE to calculate a slugging percentage, the correlation with RBI+RS increases.