In 1968, the Cincinnati Reds boasted by far the best offense in the National League. It must have been a heck of a fun team to watch. Johnny Bench was a rookie, Pete Rose had perhaps his best year, and Tony Perez was starting to establish himself as a star. Lee May, Alex Johnson, and Vada Pinson didn’t end up as famous as their teammates, but they were young and awfully good. The Big Red Machine was coming together. That year, the Reds, with their dynamite offense, scored 4.23 runs a game. To put that in context, last year the Pittsburgh Pirates, the worst-hitting team in the league, scored 4.27.

The Reds, as it happened, also had the worst pitching in the league in 1968. Their ERA was 3.56. Last year, only seven National League pitchers bested that.

1968 was of course an unusual year. Bob Gibson famously notched a 1.12 ERA for the St. Louis Cardinals, and in December the Baseball Rules Committee voted to lower the pitcher’s mound. The next year, partly because of the rule change and partly because the league added two teams, scoring rose by nearly seven-tenths of a run per game. A few years later, the American League voted to adopt the designated hitter rule. These changes created a game of perhaps unprecedented balance, but also laid the foundation for the hitters’ era through which we’re now living.

The point being illustrated here is that baseball is a far more malleable sport than many people imagine it to be. Yesterday, I suggested that an at bat in which Boston’s Daisuke Matsuzaka faced Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki was a glimpse of what baseball will look like in 10 to 15 years — that partly because of the influence of Japanese players, who play a subtler style of ball than we’re now used to, we’ll soon see a game in which bat control and ball movement will gain at the expense of power and velocity. Aesthetically, I would prefer such a game. Power and patience always have been and always will be the most important skills a hitter can have, but a game that breathes a bit more would be a welcome change after a decade and a half dominated by the home run.

Still, as a fair number of people pointed out to me, it’s one thing to suggest that baseball will change, but another to explain exactly how it will change. The offensive explosion has been driven by a bewildering number of factors — smaller parks, weight training, steroids, tightly wound baseballs, a change in the strike zone, and, most of all, the fact that the masses want to see home runs. Purists might grumble about the death of the inside game, but baseball’s ever greater popularity does not suggest that most fans want to see a return to the days when a man could lead the league with fewer than 40 home runs. Quite the opposite, in fact.

That people want to see a powerbased game and that the game is now structured to provide it are, in fact, two excellent reasons to think that baseball will not change. There are, though, at least as many reasons to think that it will.

The first is that it’s easy to change. As the rise in offense between 1968 and 1969 shows, scoring levels are highly artificial, a byproduct of the rules. Baseball has in fact been tinkering with the rules to make things a bit easier for pitchers for several years. The introduction of the Questec system and this year’s instruction to batters to keep one foot in the batter’s box throughout an at-bat are both examples of small changes meant to decrease offense a bit. Just as easily as they have been implemented, so could baseball’s poobahs decide to make more drastic changes. If after this year, owners decided to raise the mound or firmly instruct umpires to call the rulebook strike zone, we would probably see a return to 1980s scoring levels next year.

The second is that there are various factors now working against the high-offense game. Greater attention to lowering pitch counts has reduced pitcher injuries, keeping more of the game’s best arms on the mound. New and newly remodeled ballparks, like those in San Diego and Anaheim, now favor pitching and defense rather than hitting. Japanese styles of play will have a greater influence on the game in years to come — an enormous one, I tend to think. And several successful teams, like the Angels and Twins, have built franchises around pitching, defense, and contact hitting, which will inevitably lead to imitation.

Most important, though, is that owners not only have the ability to make changes and are not only encouraged to do so by several ongoing trends, but that they have a very good reason to do so: the public relations disaster that is the game’s drug scandal. Strictly as a p.r. matter, there’s little baseball could do to defuse that scandal that would have more impact than reducing scoring and home runs. It may be stupid, and it may play on the perception of a causal relationship between drugs and power hitting that doesn’t really exist, but it’s right there. Raise the mound five inches and people will largely stop grousing about steroids, guaranteed.

Concretely, I think, the power era will end within the next 10 years as a result of intervention by the people who run baseball. I expect we’ll see either a raised mound or radical changes to the way the strike zone is called, in a way that will raise the value of plate coverage and speed, and thus raise the value of defense. We won’t see a return to 1968, but we might see something more like a return to 1988. Players like Suzuki and Jose Reyes will be more valuable, and players like Richie Sexson and Carlos Delgado will be less so. Is that a good thing? It comes down to your tastes.

tmarchman@nysun.com