NE D3 Juco Hitting

Checking out seven years af D3 JuCo data? You need to get a dog. 😀

Top level pitching leaving for higher levels is probably the main cause (there just isn't that many true aces out there), but there is much more to the story. A D3 Juco where I grew up is right in the middle of a local hotbed of baseball. There are many kids from this area that are notoriously under valued by recruiters/scouts. This leaves them little to no offers. Plus factor in that many come from lower income families, they just simply can't afford a big 4 year college.   

I think it's much is harder for college hitters to adjust to college arms at the D1 level, even D2 than it is for pitchers.

A d1 hitter that drops down is a hitter that struggled against consistent good pitching. A d1 pitcher that drops down is a pitcher that either can't throw strikes or doesn't have good enough stuff to hang at the original school.

Specific to NE Jucos - I think you get a lineup of what were good HS bats that were undersized, couldn't field, or didn't have the metrics facing off against pitchers with command or velo problems or were not really good enough to be recruited out of HS. In our area, nobody goes to JC out of HS because of the baseball opportunities so I would expect the bats would be ahead of the arms.

The simple answer is that there are a lot more good hitters than good pitchers... probably at every level of college baseball. The lower the level of baseball, the higher the batting averages. Here are the current median team batting averages for NCAA:

D1 147 Princeton .281
D2 124 Missouri Western .290
D3 193 Hamline .293

But the gap is most pronounced at the top of the divisions:
D1 1 VMI .338
D2 1 MSU Denver .368
D3 1 Wilson .410

Those batting averages have certainly come down this year vs. a 7 year (I assume you did not recalculate H/PA for the 7 years, if you did, kudos to you, but the numbers may be bloated if you simply took an average of the averages).  As for this year it's more like  .285 BA and .560 ERA.(those are numbers for NESCAC, NEWMAC, LEC, CCC), conferences which typically have a nationally ranked team.

National Top 25 Schools this year from those conferences:

Ne teams often ranked or received votes:  Amherst .318, Tufts .251, Middlebury .317, Wesleyan .293

Totals by the conferences listed:

I do think that D3 tends to recruit mostly based on hitting over everything else.  (My son's team has seven listed 1B who can all hit but some have been brutal at 1st fielding low throws, which has cost them late in games)  Pitching is recruited, in my estimation, based on Potential (Project-able) which takes 2 or so years to develop, so you get really good upperclassmen and really not so good FR/So , who often still have to pitch some innings  (this is obviously a generalization, but we are talking averages).    That also means the fielding doesn't quite help the pitching.  After Covid I do think the play is getting better and pitching is also as there isn't a lot of room in D1 for new recruits so that may be why the numbers are getting more realistic as the talent filters down.

If you take the shortened covid year in that average, batting averages were way up that year vs others,, as pitchers got almost no ramp up in the NE before the shortened seasons got going.

As always, it's going to be about the quality of pitching.