How Worried Should MLB Be About the League's Offensive Struggles?

Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning you’ll get a fresh, topical column to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.

There have been five seasons in which baseball teams averaged fewer than eight hits per game. Three of those came at the peak of the deadball era—1907, 1908 and 1909. One came with the historically low offenses in the “Year of the Pitcher”—1968. And the final season, with the fewest hits of all, is this one—2021.

Of course, it’s only April, which makes it unreasonable to judge this number too harshly. As the season wears on, and the weather becomes warmer, offenses tend to pick up. This statistic might be radically different in a few months! With this…