Hey, welcome back to breaking balls.

A couple of things today.

First, Julia McWilliams of CBS Sports will be joining us here momentarily.

I want to talk to him about a couple things.

One is the overall state of the game in Major League Baseball, specifically the absolute plummeting number that is batting average in the major leagues, down to 241, which is an all-time low

outside of the 1968 season in which the mound was elevated.

If you remember that, we'll talk to Julian about that.

But first, let me, before we even get to Julian, let me just tell you this.

I'm going to show you this quickly.

And we'll put this back up when Julian joins the program here

in just a little bit. But just to give you an idea as to how bad the batting average

problem is in Major League Baseball, starting in 1976. So we're basically doing here the last 50

years. Okay, 1976, the overall batting average in Major League Baseball was 255, meaning the average hitter came in somewhere around 255.

That's the rough approximation.

The number is real.

I'm just saying you get into means and medians and all that versus averages, but you get the

idea, 1986, 258, 1996, 270. That was a steroid era. Now look, 15, 12 to 15 points of an increase

might not seem like a lot to you. It's enormous. It's gigantic.

270 was too big a number in that era.

There's too much offense.

2006, we're still in the same era.

The number was 269.

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