Unlocking 2024 MLB Secrets: Which Stats Will Make or Break the Season?

Every baseball season throws a parade of stories our way—thrilling moments, eye-popping stats, oddball records that might just spice up your next trivia night. But let’s be honest: most of these highlights evaporate into the ether faster than a foul ball into the cheap seats. Do you remember who led the National League in RBIs during the 2021 World Series champs? No? Neither did I, until I Googled Adam Duvall’s 113 RBIs. It’s wild how some numbers, no matter how bold at the moment, fade like last year’s all-star jersey.

Trying to predict which stats will become tomorrow’s legends feels like peering into a foggy mirror—uncertain, tricky, yet oddly irresistible. So, with a nod to Sam Miller’s keen reflections on baseball’s memory bank, I’m diving into nine standout numbers from 2024. These aren’t just digits; they might just be the clues marking baseball’s evolving DNA, shaping how we’ll talk, argue, and marvel over the game in years ahead. Buckle up—these figures tell stories worth holding onto.

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Whether that’s a plus (hello, Royals and Tigers fans) or a minus is a matter of perspective, but it is a shift that would be felt in the narratives we tell ourselves about the game.

This year, MLB introduced bat-tracking data via its Statcast system. If our experience with Statcast thus far has taught us anything, it’s that these numbers will prove important, and that we won’t interpret them correctly on our first try. Seth Lugo, once the poster child for spin rate, took years before actualizing his potential with a diverse array of pitches not devoted to the fastball-curveball combo he was originally prescribed.

208: Aaron Judge’s Raw Value+

That mark (.250) stays with the 1962 Mets. What the White Sox set is something less embarrassing but still significant — a new bar for what putrid baseball looks like in our current era.

On an injury-enforced vacation from his pitching duties, Ohtani turned his attention to running and put together a success rate on the bases that has never been topped by a runner with more attempts than his 63. Only one runner since integration (Jimmy Rollins in 2008) has beaten that percentage with even 50 attempts.

While it’s fair to note that the eventual World Series champions still reached 98 wins while carrying a feasible All-Star roster on the injured list, the dearth of runaway winning machines is worth monitoring. The previous 100-win drought spanned 2012-14 and coincided with one round of postseason expansion, and this one could reasonably be viewed as an even more substantial sequel.

98: Most Team Wins, by the Dodgers

Last and definitely least, the Chicago White Sox. Diving to depths that surpassed even the tanking Astros or Baltimore Orioles, the South Siders set the all-time losses record with 121. But, to their credit, a late streak of something approaching competence saved them from logging modern baseball’s worst winning percentage.

Pitchers are leaning ever so slightly more on fastballs, but it’s not just one fastball. It’s increasingly a mix of the four-seam (en vogue for its bat-missing advantages over the past decade), plus sinkers and cutters. While 61.4% of all fastballs thrown in 2021 were those straight, rising four-seamers, only 56.9% of the heaters in 2024 were, per Statcast. The rising tide of fastballs is full of cutters and sinkers darting and veering, keeping hitters just a little off balance.

In the not so distant past, the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies rode a sterling rotation to the World Series and used only 18 pitchers across the entire season. In many years, a lower number of pitchers deployed is a positive thing; it means the inevitable pitcher injury bug hasn’t hit your club as hard as usual. Now, though, a full roster’s worth of arms isn’t just a backup plan, but a necessity.

Many of these stats coexist with doubt. Will they truly stand as landmarks? Or will an unforeseen turn render them forgotten? This one is staked in the land of certainty. Judge’s recent run, including his epic 2024, creates a new standard for sentences that include “best hitting season since …” and end with a name. For so long, it has been “Bonds.” Now, a great many of those sentences will end with Judge.

94 mph: Average Velocity of Paul Skenes’ “Splinker”

Skenes brought the splinker, a hybrid pitch between a sinker and a splitter deployed earlier by Minnesota Twins reliever Jhoan Duran, to a starting role and befuddled hitters to such a degree the pitch will probably proliferate. This is a diving swing-and-miss pitch thrown at the speed of an average MLB fastball. It’s got at least a tick on Jacob deGrom’s world-beating slider. It is faster than Max Fried’s regular fastball.

Every baseball season delivers narratives, moments and, of course, numbers. Many of them are fun. Some are valuable fodder for future trivia nights. Only a few end up standing the test of time.

Being 108% better than the average hitter, as Judge was in 2024, is a different level of dominance that we should stop and appreciate. Judge, Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani all eclipsed the 200 RV+ threshold this year, calling to mind the steroid era golden age of great hitters, but without the dark shadows. It was Judge who stood atop the pile, and his particular brand of excellence inspires the purest form of awe. When he put a ball in play, his quality of contact was more than 200% better than his peers, with a 302 BIP+. All of this led him to a .700 slugging percentage, making him the first player to reach that mark since Barry Bonds.

Raw value+ (RV+) uses a lot of advanced data on plate discipline and contact quality to relay something simple: How effective is any given hitter compared to his league average counterpart? Good hitters routinely rack up seasonal marks around 125, meaning they’re a whole 25% better than the average guy in an MLB lineup. Great hitters might post seasons around 165. And usually, that would be enough to call themselves the best hitter in baseball. Unless Aaron Judge is lurking.

93.7%: Shohei Ohtani’s Stolen Base Percentage

When the trade deadline hit, the Detroit Tigers had traded away starting pitcher Jack Flaherty and conceded that their 0.2% postseason odds were not very good. Manager A.J. Hinch turned to what he dubbed “pitching chaos” and wound up MacGyver-ing a nascent rebuilding club all the way to the postseason.

Even bold ink fades quickly when there’s no cause to revisit it. Do you remember the World Series-winning player who led the National League in RBIs in 2021? No, you don’t. It was Adam Duvall with 113. Spotting what will become significant — attempting to gaze into a mirror through the looking glass, essentially — is an impossible but interesting endeavor. With a tip of the cap to Sam Miller’s broader annual survey of what we will remember about each year of baseball, let’s count down nine key numbers from 2024 that maybe, just maybe, have something important to tell us about baseball now and in the years to come.

This is baseball in the 2020s.

If this competitive landscape — in which 17 of the 30 teams finished between .500 and 95 wins — proves to be more than a fluke, it will affect the nature of the sport’s value proposition as an entertainment venture. That’s arguably the goal of postseason expansion, to create a sense of parity that is positively NFL-esque: Any given season. Any given team.

56.9%: Portion of All Fastballs That Were Four-Seamers

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This was the first full season since 2014 without a 100-game winner. The last seven full seasons had produced multiple 100-win clubs, including four in 2022 and 2019.

He nabbed 59 bases and was caught only four times. Elly De La Cruz led MLB with 67 stolen bases, but was caught 16 times.

40: Number of Pitchers the Dodgers Used in the Regular Season

The 2023 Texas Rangers essentially executed a starting rotation line change on the way to their championship, using 31 pitchers in the regular season. The 2024 Dodgers took it to another level, sending 40 different hurlers to the mound. In total, 17 pitchers started a game, none of them qualified for the ERA title, and a guy who struggled to the tune of a 5.38 ERA coming back from his second Tommy John closed out the World Series.

Who’s the best pitcher in baseball right now?

In Shohei Ohtani’s first season with the Dodgers, he won his third unanimous MVP by becoming the first player in MLB history to hit 50 homers and steal 50 bases in a season. That’s a special level of remarkable on its own, but let’s zero in on the stolen bases.

22: Starts of 5+ Innings by Tigers Pitchers After Aug. 1

Once the calendar turned to August, the Tigers went 34-19, even though their starters went the baseline five innings in less than 42% of those games. They leaned on an excellent, fluid stable of bullpen arms and, of course, Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal — who made 10 starts of 5+ innings in the stretch run. In all, 14 Tigers pitchers finished the season with better than average performance, by RV-, but only Skubal threw more than 120 innings.

Pittsburgh Pirates phenom Paul Skenes, NL Rookie of the Year and third-place Cy Young finisher, asserted himself as a good answer in his MLB debut. Channeling Mike Trout by way of the pitcher’s mound, the recent No. 1 overall pick blazed through his first 133 innings with a 1.96 ERA. Beyond the results, though, he learned and implemented a pitch that will have ripple effects for mere mortals, too.

The Houston Astros, who went on their own hot streak to claim the AL West, had 47 such starts in that timeframe. Then they ran into the Tigers’ pitching chaos. Don’t be surprised if this accidental model comes up again next year.

21%: Juan Soto’s Blast per Swing Rate

By raw value-, it was the most effective pitch thrown by any starting pitcher. It will be emulated, but probably not duplicated.

Ohtani had never stolen more than 26 bases in a season prior to 2024, and when he did that (in 2021), he simultaneously led MLB in the dubious caught stealing category, getting thrown out 10 times. The rule changes affecting pickoffs in the interim, tied to the pitch clock, obviously tilted the playing field toward runners. Yet no one has taken advantage of them as imperiously as Ohtani.

Will this become a commonplace metric bandied about on broadcasts? Your guess is as good as mine. But if it does, know that it passes the smell test as a directionally correct hitting assessment.

The post Counting Down to the New Year With 2024 MLB Stats That Will Matter Going Forward appeared first on Opta Analyst.

.253: White Sox Seasonal Winning Percentage, Just a Hair Better Than the 1962 Mets

The first bit of news: Fastball usage went up year over year, the first time that has happened across full seasons since Statcast data became public in 2015. Breaking balls and offspeed pitches have been gradually subsuming pitchers’ arsenals for a fairly obvious reason: In a vacuum, they’re harder to hit. What 2024 numbers indicate, however, is the spread of a more nuanced approach to pitching that feels a bit like a return to traditional norms.

Signs of the trend are all over the place, and one prominent advocate for this style of pitching, minor-league pitcher turned performance trainer Tyler Zombro, just joined the Chicago Cubs as a special assistant. More fastballs, in more varieties, are probably coming soon.

The initial headlines from bat-tracking data confirmed some fun intuitive suspicions: Giancarlo Stanton swings harder and more often than anyone else. Luis Arraez squares up more pitches than anyone else. When you combine the two — a “fast swing” and a “squared up swing” — it’s called a “blast,” and new New York Mets franchise player Juan Soto boasts a better rate of blasts per swing than anyone else in the game.
That’s not to ding the numbers, but to appreciate how much more digging is required to fully understand what they tell us.