US utility patents granted

From 2002 to 2022, Major League Baseball batters struck out with increasing frequency just as the United States Patent Office granted more and more utility patents, suggesting that innovation and whiffing are deeply intertwined processes. Perhaps every failed swing represents an inventor somewhere thinking harder. The r of 0.97 across 20 seasons is the kind of stat that would make a sabermetrician either very excited or immediately suspicious of their own methodology. Baseball, it turns out, may be the secret engine of the American innovation economy.

MLB strikeouts have risen essentially every year since 2005 due to a genuine strategic shift: the proliferation of high-velocity relievers, launch-angle hitting philosophy, and the Three True Outcomes approach that accepts strikeouts as tolerable in exchange for power. US utility patent grants similarly grew steadily from around 167,000 in 2002 to over 320,000 by the late 2010s, driven by tech sector expansion and globalization of patent filing. Both trends are monotonic upward curves over the same two-decade window, which is the statistical equivalent of two people walking the same direction on the same street.

A 20-year monotonic trend will correlate with virtually any other 20-year monotonic trend, which is either a profound statement about modernity or a warning about how easy it is to find patterns. The patent office and the strikeout share one trait: they both count things that didn't exist before someone tried.