US cigarette consumption

Major-league pitchers throwing more strikeouts each year, American smokers lighting fewer cigarettes. The negative correlation is poetic in the way old sportswriting wanted to be: a cleaner game, a healthier nation, on opposite sides of the same line.

Major League strikeouts per season climbed steadily from about 31,000 in 2002 to over 38,000 by 2015 as bullpens specialised, four-seam velocity rose, and analytics rewrote how counts were managed. US cigarette consumption fell by roughly a third over the same window thanks to taxation, smoking bans, and a long generational shift away from the habit. Two unrelated trends sharing one window, both driven by their own internal optimisation: pitching staffs got better at one thing, public health got better at another. Independent improvement campaigns.

Two American institutions running cleaner. The diamond and the lung graph, on diverging paths.