The Three True Outcomes: Walks, Strikeouts and Home Runs Since 2000
About one plate appearance in three now ends in a walk, a strikeout or a home run, up from fewer than three in ten in 2000. The numbers by decade and season, what drove the change, and what the rule changes of 2023 did.
In 2000, roughly 29 of every 100 major-league plate appearances ended in a walk, a strikeout or a home run. In 2019 the figure was more than 35. By the 2020s it hovered around 34. Those three results are the three true outcomes: the plate appearances in which no fielder gets to affect the result: a walk, a strikeout, or a home run that clears the fence. The phrase is shorthand among stat-minded fans for a style of play that has taken over the sport, and for the hitters, such as Rob Deer, Adam Dunn and now Aaron Judge, who embody it.
This article uses the historical record to put numbers on the trend. It breaks the share down by decade and by season since 2000, shows which of the three outcomes is doing the work (spoiler: strikeouts), looks at the teams at both ends of the range, and walks through the usual explanations for the change, with an honest note on what the data can and cannot prove.
What the three outcomes are, and why they are "true"
A walk, a strikeout and a home run have one thing in common: they are decided between the pitcher and the batter, with the defense playing almost no part. A walk is four balls. A strikeout is three strikes. A home run is a ball hit over the fence. In every other plate appearance, a ball in play leaves the bat and a fielder tries to turn it into an out, and the result depends on where it lands, how hard it is hit, and how well the defense is positioned. That part of the game carries a lot of luck, which is why analysts treat the three outcomes as the cleanest view of what the batter and pitcher did on their own.
The phrase "true outcomes" is a bit generous, since a home run still depends on the park, the wind and the ball. But as a first approximation it works, and the share of plate appearances that end this way is a convenient single number for how much of the game is played without the defense.
How the numbers are counted
The shares in this article come from the season totals of every major-league team in the historical record, for the American and National Leagues. I define a plate appearance as at-bats plus walks plus hit-by-pitches plus sacrifice flies. That leaves out sacrifice bunts and catcher's interference, which are rare today, so the shares run slightly high compared with a count that includes every plate appearance. The comparisons across years are consistent, which is what matters here.
The three-outcome share is simply walks plus strikeouts plus home runs, divided by plate appearances. Intentional walks are counted as walks. A strikeout on a dropped third strike counts as a strikeout, even if the batter reaches base.
The trend by decade
Here is the share for each decade since the 1960s, with the components.
| Period | Walks | Strikeouts | Home runs | Three outcomes combined |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960s | 8.5% | 15.5% | 2.2% | 26.2% |
| 1970s | 8.8% | 13.7% | 2.0% | 24.4% |
| 1980s | 8.5% | 14.2% | 2.1% | 24.9% |
| 1990s | 9.0% | 16.1% | 2.5% | 27.5% |
| 2000s | 8.7% | 17.1% | 2.8% | 28.7% |
| 2010s | 8.2% | 20.7% | 2.8% | 31.7% |
| 2020 to 2025 | 8.5% | 22.8% | 3.1% | 34.4% |
Two observations stand out. First, the share has not risen in a straight line. It fell in the 1970s to about 24 percent and has risen in every decade since. Second, walks barely moved. The walk rate has stayed between roughly 8 and 9 percent for 60 years, so the whole increase in the three-outcome share has come from strikeouts, up by about nine points since the 1970s, and home runs, up by about a point.
Season by season since 2000
The decade averages hide some sharp swings. Here are selected seasons.
| Season | Walks | Strikeouts | Home runs | Combined | Runs per team-game |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 9.7% | 16.6% | 3.0% | 29.3% | 5.14 |
| 2004 | 8.7% | 17.0% | 2.9% | 28.6% | 4.81 |
| 2008 | 8.8% | 17.7% | 2.6% | 29.1% | 4.65 |
| 2012 | 8.1% | 19.9% | 2.7% | 30.7% | 4.32 |
| 2016 | 8.2% | 21.2% | 3.1% | 32.5% | 4.48 |
| 2019 | 8.6% | 23.1% | 3.6% | 35.3% | 4.83 |
| 2021 | 8.7% | 23.3% | 3.3% | 35.3% | 4.53 |
| 2022 | 8.2% | 22.5% | 2.9% | 33.5% | 4.28 |
| 2023 | 8.6% | 22.8% | 3.2% | 34.6% | 4.62 |
| 2025 | 8.4% | 22.3% | 3.1% | 33.8% | 4.45 |
Among full seasons, the peak so far came in 2019 and 2021, at 35.3 percent in each. Per team-game, the 2019 season produced 1.39 home runs and 8.81 strikeouts, against 1.17 and 6.45 in 2000. The 2010 season, in between, had 0.95 home runs and 7.06 strikeouts per team-game, a quieter year for home runs and a low-scoring one, at 4.38 runs per team-game. (The 2020 season, shortened to 60 games, had a share of about 36 percent, though a sample that small should be read with caution.)
Strikeouts are the engine
Of the three outcomes, strikeouts did most of the work. In 2000, a team struck out 6.45 times a game. In 2019 it was 8.81, a rise of more than a third. The strikeout share went from 16.6 percent of plate appearances in 2000 to 23.1 percent in 2019, and it has since eased only slightly, to 22.3 percent in 2025.
The extremes make the point. Among team-seasons of 100 or more games since 2000, the highest combined share belongs to the 2023 Minnesota Twins at about 40.0 percent, with 1,654 strikeouts, 594 walks and 233 home runs. The 2024 Seattle Mariners (39.3 percent, 1,625 strikeouts) and the 2025 Los Angeles Angels (39.1 percent, 1,627 strikeouts) followed. At the other end, the lowest share since 2000 was the 2002 Anaheim Angels at about 22.6 percent, with 805 strikeouts, 462 walks and 152 home runs, a team that won 99 games. The 2007 Mariners (22.7 percent) were nearly as low. So the gap between the lowest-outcome team in 2002 and the highest in 2023 is about 17 points, a different sport in terms of what happens in a plate appearance.
Notice what the table does not say. The 2023 Twins won their division at 87-75. The 2024 Mariners went 85-77. A high three-outcome share is not a recipe for failure, and a low one is not a recipe for success: the 2008 Mariners had one of the lowest shares at 23.3 percent and lost 101 games. What the share measures is style, not quality.
Home runs rise and fall
The home-run rate behaves differently from the strikeout rate. It has gone up and down in cycles, and the cycles are sharper. Per team-game, home runs were 1.17 in 2000, then fell to 0.95 in 2010, rose to 1.39 in 2019, dropped to 1.07 in 2022, and stood at 1.16 in 2025. The 2019 jump, from 1.15 in 2018 to 1.39, was a large single-year increase, and by 2022 the rate was back down to 1.07.
The historical record cannot say why. Many analysts attributed the 2019 spike and the later decline to changes in the baseball itself, the aerodynamics of the ball having changed in ways that affected how far a fly ball carried. That cannot be confirmed from this data, which contains no ball measurements. What the numbers do show is that the home-run rate responded to something in the environment, not only to hitters' choices, and that the strikeout rate did not move in sympathy.
The balls in play went missing
If you take away the three outcomes, what remains is the ball in play. Using at-bats minus strikeouts minus home runs plus sacrifice flies as an estimate, balls in play accounted for about 69.9 percent of plate appearances in 2000, 63.7 percent in 2019 and 65.1 percent in 2025. In 1990 the share was 73.6 percent. That is a decline of about nine points in 30 years.
A smaller share of balls in play means fewer chances for defense, fewer baserunners moving on contact, and a different rhythm. The league batting average fell with it, from .270 in 2000 to .252 in 2019 and .245 in 2025. Runs per team-game did not fall as far, because the home runs and walks that scored runs held up: 5.14 in 2000, 4.83 in 2019, 4.45 in 2025. The 2000 season, with its offense at a modern peak, is the outlier at the top.
What hitters and pitchers did
Several explanations have been offered for the shift, and most of them are probably partly right.
Hitters accepted more strikeouts to hit for power. Teams came to value the home run and the walk and to treat the strikeout as roughly as costly as other outs. A hitter who swings hard and misses more often but hits more home runs can be worth more than a contact hitter who hits singles. Aaron Judge's career is the extreme case: through 2025, using the approximate plate-appearance definition above, about 51 percent of his plate appearances ended in a walk, a strikeout or a home run, the highest of any hitter who debuted in 1950 or later with at least 4,000 plate appearances. Adam Dunn (49.9 percent) and Rob Deer (49.1 percent) are next. Deer led the American League in strikeouts in 1987 with 186.
Pitchers specialized and came in fresh. As starters pitched fewer innings and relievers took more, hitters faced a steady stream of pitchers throwing at full effort for an inning or two. The data in the historical tables show the first half of that: complete games have nearly vanished. For more on workload, see what a quality start is and what it measures. A common explanation is that pitchers throw more pitches built to miss bats, and the changeup and the splitter explains two of them. Statcast pitch data would test this directly, but it is not in the historical record.
Analytics changed the incentives. Teams learned that a walk is worth nearly as much as a single, that a sacrifice bunt usually costs more than it gains, and that stolen bases pay only if the success rate is high. The result was fewer bunts and fewer steals and more at-bats resolved by the three outcomes. For a look at how those ideas shape a batting order, read lineup construction and the math of the batting order.
Defense got better at turning balls in play into outs. Defensive shifts, in which fielders were positioned by hitter tendencies, took away hits on ground balls. A hitter whose ground balls turn into outs more often may have an added reason to try for a home run. The shift was restricted in 2023, and I return to that below.
The ball itself. As noted, the home run spikes remain unexplained by the data here.
The rule changes of 2023
For the 2023 season the league introduced several changes: a pitch clock, limits on defensive shifts, and larger bases. One stated goal was more balls in play and more action. The historical numbers show a modest response. The balls-in-play share was about 65.3 percent in 2022, 64.2 in 2023, 65.0 in 2024 and 65.1 in 2025, while the strikeout rate stayed between 22 and 23 percent. The league batting average moved from .243 in 2022 to .248 in 2023, and the stolen-base leader jumped: Ronald Acuna led the majors in 2023 with 73 and Esteury Ruiz had 67, while the 2019 leader, Mallex Smith, had 46. Those are small changes in a trend that is 20 years old. The rule changes did not reverse the three-outcome era; they nudged it.
Is it good or bad?
That depends on what you like. Fans of contact, baserunning and defense have a case that the game has lost some of its variety: if a third of the plate appearances end without a fielder involved, then a third of the game has no fielding. Fans of power and patience can argue that each of the three outcomes is an excellent result for the hitter, that walks and home runs score runs, and that the sport is more efficient than before.
The data supports neither side completely. Runs per team-game are lower than in 2000 but higher than in 2010, so the offense has not collapsed. Attendance is roughly the same, at 71.4 million in 2000, 73.1 million in 2010, 68.5 million in 2019 and 70.7 million in 2023, according to the historical season sheets.
Common questions
Who coined "three true outcomes"? The phrase comes from online baseball analysis and is widely used; this article does not attribute it to any one person.
Do the three outcomes include hit-by-pitch? Usually not. Some versions of the idea add it, because a hit-by-pitch also happens without the defense, but the standard count is walks, strikeouts and home runs.
Is a high three-outcome rate bad for a hitter? Not by itself. Mark McGwire in 1998 had 70 home runs, 162 walks and 155 strikeouts, a three-outcome share of about 57 percent, and that was one of the great offensive seasons in the record book.
Which hitter had the highest share in a season? Among hitters with at least 550 approximate plate appearances since 1980, Joey Gallo in 2021 had the highest I found, about 58.8 percent (213 strikeouts, 111 walks, 38 home runs).
Does the trend continue? The data through 2025 shows a plateau, with a combined share between 33 and 36 percent every season since 2018. Whether it falls further depends on the rules and on how teams respond.
Where to go next
To look at hitters yourself, the leaders page lists walks, strikeouts and home runs for any season, and the stat calculator will compute the shares for a line you enter. Our guide to a player's statistics page explains each column so you can read the numbers behind this article. The stats and analytics topic page collects more on how these measures are used.