WHERE HAVE ALL THE DOUBLES GONE?

A 125-Year Look at How the Launch Angle Revolution Buried Baseball’s Most Exciting Hit

There is something about a well-struck double that gets the blood moving. The crack of the bat. The ball skipping past a diving outfielder. A runner chugging from first, taking his turn hard at third, and sliding into second just ahead of the relay throw. It is fast, it is decisive, and for most of baseball history, it was a staple of the game.

Not anymore.

The two-bagger is disappearing, and the numbers make uncomfortable reading. Since 2007 — the modern high-water mark for doubles production — the major leagues have lost nearly one full double every two games compared to what teams were producing at the peak. That doesn’t sound like much until you do the math across a 30-team, 162-game season. We are talking about roughly 1,450 doubles that have vanished from the game, per year, gone as if someone turned a dial down without telling anyone.

To understand what happened, though, you have to go back to the beginning — 1900, to be exact.

The Honest Way to Look at 125 Years
Raw totals are worthless for comparison across baseball history. More teams mean more doubles. Longer schedules mean more doubles. To get a true picture, you need doubles per team per game — a figure that strips out the noise of expansion and schedule changes and gives you an apples-to-apples read on how often a given team was producing a two-base hit.

That is what the tables below do. It is not glamorous math, but it tells the real story.

TABLE 1: MLB DOUBLES PER TEAM PER GAME — ERA BENCHMARKS

Source: Baseball Almanac, MLB Doubles League Totals. Figures normalized by the author. ★ = modern-era peak.

TABLE 2: SELECTED SEASONS — DOUBLES PER TEAM PER GAME (1900–2025)

Source: Baseball Almanac, MLB Doubles League Totals. 2025 figures through end of season. ★ = modern all-time peak.

The Dead Ball Floor and the Live Ball BoomThe Dead Ball Era (1904–1910) sits at the bottom of the chart. Teams averaged just 1.00 to 1.14 doubles per game. The true floor came in 1907, when the number landed at 1.00 exactly. Pitchers ruled the earth. Fields were rough, the ball was soft and heavily used mid-game, and nobody was driving anything into the gap with any kind of authority.

Then came 1920, and the whole sport turned over.

The spitball was banned. A cleaner, livelier baseball was put into play. And Babe Ruth (OF, NYY) had already begun rewriting what offense was supposed to look like. Doubles production jumped from 1.28 per team per game in 1919 to 1.46 in 1920 — a one-year jump that had no precedent. It kept going after that. By 1925, teams were hitting 1.76 doubles per game. By 1930, the league-wide mark reached 1.93 — still the highest normalized doubles rate in the game’s history for any era with a stable number of teams.

Earl Webb (OF, BOS) set the all-time single-season doubles record in 1931, hitting 67 two-baggers for the Red Sox.[1] That record has held for 94 years and counting.

The Depression years pulled the numbers back. The WWII years (1942–1945) brought another dip as quality players entered military service, with doubles per team per game dropping to the 1.41–1.48 range. The postwar era settled into a solid plateau — between 1.38 and 1.51 per team per game from 1946 to 1960 — productive by any standard, but nothing like the roaring 1920s.

The 1961–62 expansion thinned the pitching talent briefly, then baseball overcorrected into the Year of the Pitcher. By 1968, doubles had fallen to 1.19 per team per game, and Carl Yastrzemski (OF, BOS) won the American League batting title hitting .301.[2] Commissioner William Eckert and the rules committee lowered the mound five inches the following season, from 15 to 10 inches, and the game opened back up.

The Golden Age: 1993–2007
Starting with the arrival of the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies in 1993, doubles production began a 15-year climb that put the pre-expansion records in a new context. Coors Field was a doubles machine from the moment it opened in 1995.[3] The altitude in Denver — 5,280 feet above sea level — gave every hard line drive extra legs. Todd Helton (1B, COL) became one of the era’s signature gap hitters, and the ballpark made visiting lineups look like they had all suddenly found the other way.[4]

The expansion to 30 teams in 1998 added fresh mounds for overmatched pitchers. The offensive climate — whatever judgments history eventually renders on it — pushed more balls into play and more of them into the gaps. Contact was still valued. Going the other way was still taught. Using the whole field was still a point of pride.

Craig Biggio (2B, HOU) accumulated 668 career doubles, finishing among the all-time leaders.[5] Edgar Martinez (DH, SEA) built a Hall of Fame case hitting line drives into corners for nearly two decades. The double was not just a byproduct of offense in those years. It was a measuring stick.

The peak came in 2007. That season, the 30 major league teams combined for 9,197 doubles — a normalized rate of 1.89 per team per game. That is the modern-era high. No season since has come close.

The Decline: 2008–2025
And then it started going in the other direction. Slowly at first, then less slowly.

TABLE 3: THE MODERN DECLINE IN CONTEXT (2007–2025)

Note: 2020 excluded — 60-game COVID season distorts comparisons. Source: Baseball Almanac, MLB League Totals. Figures normalized by the author.

The drop from 1.89 in 2007 to 1.59 in 2025 is a 16 percent decline in normalized doubles production over 18 years. That puts the current rate at levels not seen since the early 1980s. Three numbers in that table tell the story of why it happened.

Strikeouts
In 2007, teams struck out 6.62 times per game. By 2019, that had climbed all the way to 8.81 — an all-time record for a full season.[6] The pitch clock introduced in 2023 has brought the number down somewhat, and 2025 sits at 8.36. But that is still historically staggering. You cannot hit a double on a strikeout. It really is that simple. Every strikeout is a ball that never went into play, never rolled into the gap, never sent a runner around second.

Home runs.
Teams hit 1.02 home runs per game in 2007 — the doubles peak year. By 2019, that was 1.39. In 2025, it stands at 1.16. The power numbers have risen as the doubles numbers fell, and that is not a coincidence.

The ratio.
In 2007, teams hit 54 home runs for every 100 doubles. In 2019, that ratio had climbed to 80 home runs per 100 doubles. In 2025, it sits at 73. In other words, in 2007 hitters were putting up roughly two doubles for every home run. Today it is fewer than 1.4 doubles per home run. The gap has closed by nearly a third in less than 20 years, and it shows no sign of reversing.

What Changed: The Swing
The launch angle revolution is the best explanation, and the timeline fits.

Starting around 2015 and hitting full stride by 2017, teams and individual hitters began optimizing swings for home runs — higher launch angles, more uppercut, more lift. The logic is sound enough. A home run is worth more than a double. If a hitter can adjust his swing path to trade a line drive into the gap for a ball that clears the fence, the run-production math favors making that trade.

The problem is the side effects. The same elevated swing path that produces home runs also produces pop-ups, warning-track fly balls, and — most commonly — strikeouts. The line drive to left-center, the one that splits the outfielders and rolls to the warning track while the runner from first is chugging for second and having to hold up — that hit became less common because fewer hitters were swinging with the intention of producing it.

The shift played a role for a while as well, though that experiment ended after the 2022 season. For years, pulled ground balls that would have gone for singles — and occasionally set up the whole field for extra-base hits on the next pitch — instead became easy outs on the infield. Hitters responded by lifting the ball rather than going the other way. That adjustment fed directly into the launch angle approach.

The “three true outcomes” — home runs, walks, and strikeouts — became the new organizing principle of hitting. The double requires a specific kind of hard contact to a specific part of the field, and it does not fit neatly into any of those three boxes. It is the hit that fell through the cracks.

Does It Matter?
That is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer. The decline in doubles production is not an emergency. Runs are still being scored. Games are still being played. Not every trend in baseball statistics represents a crisis in the sport.

But something real has changed. Something worth noticing.

Tris Speaker (CF, CLE, BOS) built a Hall of Fame case almost entirely on the extra-base hit — 792 career doubles, a record that still stands today.[7] He played in an era when getting the ball into the gap, stretching a single into a double, using the whole field — those were considered the highest skills a hitter could develop. They were coached. They were celebrated. A manager watching a young hitter pull everything to one side of the field would have called him into the office.

The current game celebrates the home run, accepts the strikeout as a cost of doing business, and has largely stopped teaching the other thing. The result is visible in the numbers: a slow, steady drain on one of the sport’s most electric plays, unfolding season by season, so gradually that most fans have not quite noticed it is happening.