I’m not a statistician or sports expert, so here goes:
In over half a century, only one person head 60+ homers. In the past few years, three have.
Random statistical anomaly? Watering-down due to expansions? Park sizes?
Stephen Jay Gould had an interesting article some years ago on “Why there are no more .400 hitters,” the conclusion of which (IIRC) was that the rest of the game (like fielding) had caught up to the batters.
Any opinions?
I think it’s a combination of three main factors with some others thrown in for flavoring.
Diluted Pitching Staffs
Expansion, 'nuff said.
Weight Training
Taken alone, the previous item would simply mean higher averages. Add stronger hitters and you get longer hits.
Cozier Confines
More balls hit and hit further would just mean more fly outs if the walls weren’t coming in a bit in these new parks. Hell, the Giants built their park with the clear aim of providing Barry Bonds with more home runs. The ultimate payback will be years from now when their best hitter hits his longest balls to the left field fence and can’t get one out for the home crowd to save his freaking life.
I don’t really buy the notion of dilution. The problem with this as an explanation for the home run increase is that
A) If it were true, then the extra home runs being hit would be at the expense of the 22 extra pitchers who otherwise would not be in the league were it not for the 1998 expansion (or the extra 44 if you want to go pre-1993.) All other pitchers should not feel the effects of dilution; in fact, they would BENEFIT, since they’d be facing a diluted pool of hitters. However, that isn’t the case; home runs and offense are up across the board.
B) There was no comparable glut of homers after the 1969 expansion, which was a comparably larger increase in the size of the major leagues than the recent expansions; 4 teams added to a 20-team league in one year, rather than 4 added for a 26-team league in six years. There was a homer increase during the 1961 expansion but it was relatively limited (Roger Maris was a huge outlier.)
I think the main reason is simply that ballplayers today are much, much stronger than they used to be. Twenty years ago players simply didn’t weight train. Today they’re all pumped up like Mr. Universe contestants; Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, Carlos Delgado, Jim Thome, Brian Giles - they all lift weights, they all have arms like oak trees. Twenty years ago the strongest player in baseball probably would have been Mike Schmidt or Dave Kingman; today, there’s eight or nine guys on every team around who are a lot more muscular than Mike Schmidt was. NOBODY was as big and strong as Mark McGwire. I mean, look at the pipes on Sammy Sosa - the guy’s built like a Greek god.
The surge in body building and wight lifting gives hitters an advantage that pitchers do not get. Extra musculature on the arms won’t help a pitcher throw that much harder; if anything, it’ll hurt. You can’t do Nautilus to throw a better slider.
This would explain to some extent why home runs are up so much but batting average hasn’t reached anything like a historical high. Being strong will help you hit home runs but it doesn’t have a lot of impact on batting average (it has some, since a hard-hit ball is likelier to fall in or go over the fence than a softly hit ball.) For the most part the pitchers are doing a historically normal job of keeping guys off base, which should not be the case if dilution is a problem. It’s HOME RUNS, and not anything else, that have shot off the charts.
In Dan Patrick’s Outtakes book, he asks all the hitters (Mark McGwire, Tony Gwinn, Mark Grace) and pitchers (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine) whether or not the ball is now “juiced”. The hitters denied it outright, but the pitchers (who I would trust to know the ball a lot better than hitters) weren’t quite so sure and said they might well be more tightly wound, which could well contribute to long balls.
I think the ever-shrinking strike zone is a huge factor in the game now.
It is definitely the strength and ability of the athletes today. Wouldn’t it be strange if that didn’t increase the number of home runs being hit? And there can be no doubt about it, baseball players take much better care of themselves than they used to.
Of course, smaller ballparks do help.
But if they juiced the ball as well, there would probably already be 100-HR seasons.