It occurred to after I posted this that the reason for the dip overall pitcher batting in the late nineties is due to the introduction of interleague baseball. Starting in 1997 AL pitchers batted in NL parks. You will notice that all of the battings stats for pitchers take a big hit in 1997.

I contend that the improvement that Kurkjian points to is based more on a combination of luck and of AL batters starting to catch up with their NL counterparts than any real improvement in hitting for pitchers overall. Here is a comparison of the stats from the previous post broken down by league for 1997 and 2002:

1997
Lg	BA	OBP	SLUG	OPS	HR/AB
AL	.105	.133	.146	.279	0.40%
NL	.140	.177	.177	.354	0.36%
MLB	.138	.175	.175	.350	0.36%
 
2002
Lg	BA	OBP	SLUG	OPS	HR/AB
AL	.135	.170	.153	.323	0.00%
NL	.148	.179	.194	.373	0.54%
MLB	.148	.179	.191	.370	0.51%
 
1997
Lg	BA%	OBP%	SLUG%	OPS%	HR/AB%
AL	39.46%	39.59%	34.78%	36.92%	13.57%
NL	52.39%	52.60%	42.14%	46.80%	11.91%
MLB	51.72%	51.93%	41.76%	46.29%	12.00%
 
2002					
Lg	BA%	OBP%	SLUG%	OPS%	HR/AB%
AL	51.75%	51.35%	36.73%	43.20%	0.00%
NL	56.74%	54.17%	46.46%	49.88%	17.80%
MLB	56.47%	54.02%	45.94%	49.52%	16.85%

The NL figures have remained close to the pre-interleague numbers. The AL is starting to catch up in everything but home runs.

The one-year dip in pitcher home run percent in 1994 (6.90%, fifty percentage lower than the year before and sixty percent less than the year after) is still confusing to me. There was no interleague play as yet. The only thing that could have skewed the data is the strike that cut short the season. But one would, or at least I would, expect more home runs to be hit in the spring.

Frankly, I'm at a loss, other than to say the sample must have been too small give the games lost to the strike. If anyone has a better rationale, let me know.