Don't blame Roy S. Johnson, Special to ESPN.com. He's just saying what everyone else is saying.

Johnson's article, "2010: Year of the Dominant Pitcher," asserts, as you might expect, that "By now, it should be clear that 2010 is the Year of the Dominant Pitcher." His evidence:

• Stephen Strasburg was really awesome on Tuesday;
• The Pirates' hitters were really bad always on Tuesday;
• Three no-hitters, two perfect games, and whatever it was Armando Galarraga did;
• There are currently 25 pitchers with ERAs under 3.00, when there were just 11 at the end of 2009; and
• Ubaldo Jimenez.

I can totally see where Johnson, and everybody, gets that idea. Three perfect games in one season is just insanely unlikely (John Dewan, at statoftheweek.com, puts the odds at 16,033-to-1; Tommy Bennett of Baseball Prospectus used a different method that suggested it was about forty times less likely than even that). Strasburg and Jimenez and Halladay are awesome. And scoring is lower right now than it was at the end of last year, or even through June of last year.

I just don't think anything we've seen so far proves anything. And I realize that that gives writers a lot less to write about, but I think it's true anyway.

David Pinto's excellent Day By Day database tells me that MLB hitters have put up these lines from opening day through June 9 of the last four years:

2007: .261/.331/.411
2008: .260/.332/.407
2009: .261/.335/.415.
2010: .259/.330/.408

I mean, I know that Johnson's point is that it's the year of the dominating pitcher, but the undercurrent is that scoring is way down everywhere, and sentiment there and elsewhere seems to be that it's the Year of the Pitcher, generally. And if that's the case, don't you think we'd see some meaningful difference between those numbers that actually lead to the scoring of runs? If there's an outlier there at all, it's last year, when scoring was actually up a bit early and went down late in the year. In those other years, what happened is about what I expect will happen this year; offense was down in the cold months, and went up in the warm months.

I also just don't think people understand how much this stuff can fluctuate, month to month, even across the entire league. Here's the scoring by month, in runs per game per team, figured from BBREF's MLB-wide splits:

A statistician might be able to tell you what that meant in some detail: all I can tell you is that those numbers are kind of all over the place, and as such, that I don't think we should be reading anything at all into two months plus nine days. 2010 has started out almost exactly like 2008 did, and 2009 started out with much more offense...but 2008 actually ended up with more runs per game than 2009 did. It's entirely possible that as the weather keeps warming up over the next several weeks, teams start scoring close to five runs a game, and the overall offensive levels approach or surpass 2008 and 2009.

What about all those dominant performances? Shutouts through June, 2007-09: 19, 21, 27. So far in 2010: 23. High, considering we've got three weeks left in June, but not crazy high. No guarantee we'll end up with more shutouts this year than last.There were 28 shutouts through June in 2006, too. This isn't hugely out of the ordinary.

And Johnson's point that there are 25 guys with a sub-3.00 ERA and only 11 at the end of 2009 is very flawed: it's obviously much easier/more likely to post a low ERA through 12 or 13 starts than through 30 or 33 of them. But at the same time, strangely, it might be his one point that sort of hits home. Going back to the Day by Day Database, it tells me there were 17 pitchers with a sub-3.00 ERA who qualified for the ERA title (roughly estimated) at this point last year...not 11, but actually closer to 11 than 25. In 2008 there were just eight sub-3s at this point (the same number they ended with), and in 2007, 15 (but ended with just one, Jake Peavy). So there are more individuals putting up low ERAs this year than there have been at this point in the last few...but as 2007 shows, that doesn't tell us anything about how they're going to end up.

The bottom line is that the evidence that this year is actually meaningfully different from the last (or the one before that, or the one before that) is pretty thin. It's possible that offense is down and pitching is up, but nobody can know that yet. There certainly have been a lot of really impressive and noteworthy pitching performances, an unusually high number of them, but the fact that a handful of memorable games have happened so far doesn't mean they're likely to keep happening, or that (as Johnson suggests) we'll see a lot more 2-1 and 1-0 games than we're used to. I think it's more likely that league scoring winds up just about exactly where it's been for the last three or four seasons.