Last week I wrote the first part of this article, covering how pitching has changed to be less reliant on starting pitching and how the role of the reliever has grown, especially over the past twenty years. It was a fairly short article and might have seemed underwhelming. There were two reasons for this: 1) much of the data (e.g., the pitch types and locations) is lacking in data from earlier than the 2000s. 2) I want to attribute the growing rise in strikeouts to the hitters moreso than pitchers.
And that brings me straight to Part 2: Hitting and (as a result) Fielding.