There's a power outage in Major League Baseball, at least through the first month and a week. Draw whatever conclusions you want from that (the strict anti-drug policy is deflating power numbers, the weather hasn't warmed up yet, etc.) but it seems almost every team is suffering from a supermassive black hole in the middle of their batting orders. Maybe the pitching just got better.

Before we get to the specifics, let's go over the general downward trend in scoring:



In both leagues, scoring is down -- more drastically so in the American League. 2008 projects to see about 300 less HR in the AL and 250 less in the NL; overall scoring is down a half-run in the AL and a tenth of a run in the NL. Surprisingly, walks are being drawn at a higher rate, but OBP is still down in the AL and has stayed the same in the NL.

Now, let's look over the American League designated hitters:



The average OBP/SLG/OPS for an AL DH so far is .329/.390/.719 with 4 HR and 18 RBI. Not exactly slugger material. You should notice a lot of familiar names on the right-hand side: David Ortiz, Jim Thome, Travis Hafner -- they're all struggling to produce. The Tampa Bay Rays and the New York Yankees are the only teams with a DH putting up an OPS over .800. Five AL teams have a DH putting up an OPS under .700.

In the NL, I took a look at each roster and looked at a struggling slugger who was expected to be the backbone of the team's offense. The only team I had trouble finding a struggling slugger was the Florida Marlins: everybody's hitting well despite scoring a league-average 4.65 runs per game (yet they have a NL-second-best 112 OPS+).



Those are just atrocious numbers. As above, you should notice some familiar names: Ryan Howard, Carlos Delgado, Alfonso Soriano, Ken Griffey, Jr.

The average OBP/SLG/OPS line for these sluggers is .292/.340/.632 with 3 HR and 13 RBI. Most of these guys were expected to be in the #3-5 slots in the lineup and some have since been dropped down.

If you thought Andruw Jones was having an awful season for the Los Angeles Dodgers, check out Ryan Zimmerman, Troy Tulowitzki (now on the D.L.), and Jim Edmonds -- each has a .511 OPS or worse.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues or to see if it's simply aberrant, perhaps due to the thus far cool temperatures.

The title of this article, by the way, is an homage to the song by the band Muse off of their album "Black Holes and Revelations."