Scoring is Down in the Arizona Fall League
This was going to be a post about performance of Mets’ farmhands out in the desert in the Arizona Fall League, but instead it turned into a post about league itself.
I was going to apply the usual AFL caveat that this is an extreme hitters’ league and thus, one should treat the numbers produced by both hitters and pitchers with a light touch, or normalize them for league values. Then I looked at the numbers. The AFL is still is absolutely a hiters’ league, but it is less so than in recent years.
This year, the AFL is hitting a collective .266/.344/.397 and scoring 5.2 runs per game. That’s roughly comparable in terms of scoring to the 2012 version of the Pacific Coast League (.278/.345/.430; 5.1 R/G), but with a little less power. However, it is the lowest level of offense for the AFL in the last five years. The AFL’s isoloated slugging, a measure of power, is down to its lowest level in eight years (before that the data is scattered and hard to collect). On a year over year basis, AFL scoring is down 13%.
| Year | G | R | R/G | AVG | OBP | SLG | ISO | OPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 66 | 343 | 5.2 | .266 | .344 | .397 | .131 | .741 |
| 2011 | 220 | 1311 | 6.0 | .286 | .362 | .454 | .168 | .816 |
| 2010 | 192 | 1108 | 5.8 | .283 | .357 | .431 | .148 | .788 |
| 2009 | 192 | 1150 | 6.0 | .283 | .361 | .443 | .160 | .804 |
| 2008 | 228 | 1529 | 6.7 | .293 | .365 | .473 | .180 | .838 |
| 2007 | 204 | 1004 | 4.9 | .258 | .339 | .391 | .133 | .730 |
| 2006 | 192 | 1087 | 5.7 | .275 | .358 | .413 | .138 | .771 |
| 2005 | 192 | 1166 | 6.1 | .296 | .360 | .470 | .174 | .830 |
What’s going on here? I do not know, although I’m open to suggestions. Some potential explanations follow.
- The league’s season is only two weeks old and this is just a dreaded small sample size blip. By November, the AFL’s power and scoring numbers will be right back to their recent historical levels. This we can test by waiting a month.
- Perhaps teams are sending younger, less experienced and thus less powerful prospects to the AFL. The Mets’ delegation this year is a strong example of this. Among the position players, the Mets sent two outfielders from Advanced-A (Darrell Ceciliani and Cesar Puello) and an infielder from low-A (Dustin Lawley). There is not a single regular season AA plate appearance among this group. (This too is testable by comparing the average age of the players in this year’s AFL delegations to year’s past.)
- The decline is a reflection of the overall decline in offense in baseball at the MLB level. (This is testable too – do AFL scoring and power levels track those in MLB closely?)
I’m open to other explanations as well.
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