Virginia baseball is the nation's No. 1 team for a reason.
Cavalier junior pitcher Danny Hultzen is a National Player of the Year candidate, and the rotation's No. 4 starter tossed a perfect game. Virginia has the nation's third-best fielding percentage and the 2009 Coach of the Year at its helm.
And the team has new bats - bats that have devastated hitters nationwide but may have helped Virginia earn the best record in baseball thus far.
Prior to the 2011 season, the NCAA mandated a switch to aluminum bats that are designed to perform like wooden bats. The rules force bats to comply with a "Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution" - a statistic that measures the ball's bounce off the metal - similar to that of Major League Baseball. The NCAA also has reduced the bat's "sweet spot," or its ideal point of contact, down to three inches. Essentially, the bats have undergone complicated changes with a simple result: reduced offense.
"In the past, certain balls that you miss slightly would still go out, because the sweet spot was bigger," junior third baseman Steven Proscia said. "Now that it's smaller, those balls tend to not leave the park as much."
Through the season's first half, empirical evidence confirms Proscia's observation. According to data from 1995 to 2010, college baseball teams averaged 0.82 home runs per game. The NCAA released statistics April 3 showing that number is down to 0.47 home runs per game this year - nearly half the recent average.
From 1995 to 2010, the standard deviation between home runs per year was just 0.03, so analyzing the data with an independent samples test demonstrates a statistical significance between the two means - in other words, it shows that the variation this year could not be explained by chance alone. In fact, the p-value of the data is less than .0001, meaning it is almost statistically impossible that the drop in home runs would occur randomly. There must be an explanation for the change, and the new bats loom large as the potential causal factors. Admittedly, this year's college baseball players are different from the ones who preceded them. By some random variation, college baseball offenses could be especially weak this year or pitchers could be particularly strong.
However, looking back to 1974 - the year college baseball first introduced aluminum bats - home runs never have been so infrequent, so it is unlikely that the year of new bats just happens to coincide with the poorest power production in history.
Strengthening that conclusion, teams are striking out an average 6.9 times per inning, a comparable rate to the 6.8 times a year since 1995. By definition, strikeouts occur when the bat does not make contact with the ball, so factoring out the bat leaves offenses performing at similar levels. But for aspects of the game that do involve the bat - such as hitting home runs - the numbers are significantly down.
These statistics do not come from a controlled laboratory experiment, so causation cannot be absolutely determined. But the results confirm what the players already know.
The bats "are definitely different; the ball is not traveling as far," junior catcher John Hicks said. "You can tell that there is a difference just by looking at the ERAs around the country."
Looking at those ERAs shows a dramatic decrease in scoring. Since 1995, teams have averaged 6.45 runs per game, while this year teams average just 5.71, another statistically significant difference.
For Virginia, however, runs per game are actually above the team's recent norm. The Cavaliers have scored 7.35 runs per game this year, nearly half a run more than its average of 6.9 runs since 2002. The new bats have provoked complaints from many college hitters, but they also seemingly have helped Virginia amass the nation's best winning percentage.
"I think a lot of people would want to go back to the old bats, especially power hitters and guys that hit for home runs and have that type of approach at the plate," Proscia said. "But for our program, we haven't really been a home run-hitting team. We fundamentally hit, and bats don't really matter in that situation. I think that's why this year, we've been doing so well as a team."
When Virginia lost potent hitters such as All-American center fielder Jarrett Parker and second baseman Phil Gosselin to professional baseball, preseason polls understandably predicted a drop in the team's performance. Indeed, in 65 games last year, the Cavaliers belted 61 home runs. This season, the team is currently on pace to hit about 17 homers. After 35 games and 32 wins, however, Virginia is arguably producing its best season yet.
"The last few years, we had guys who could really hit the ball out of the park," Hicks said. "We took advantage of it, but this year we lost the guys who hit a lot of those home runs. Now we are forced to handle the bat better and I think we've done a great job of doing that."
The Cavaliers knew they would lose last year's power and adjusted their game accordingly. The team features strong pitching and defense, two areas of the game that have been helped rather than hindered by the new bats. Virginia entered the season knowing it could not overpower its opponents, so the team instead embraced a small-ball style of play.
"I think it works well for our team," Hicks said. "We can bunt, we try to hit line drives, we don't try to hit the ball out of the park, and so we get 'em on, get 'em over, get 'em in."
The new bats forced every other college baseball team to adopt that same strategy, essentially forcing them to play a game that Virginia was better at - and a game the Cavaliers have been winning.\nSo while Hicks admits other players may complain about flyouts that would have been home runs in years past, Virginia is not upset.
As Proscia said, "As long as we keep winning, I like the new bats"
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