HR records are breaking and fans are asking why
Baseballs flew out of ballparks in record numbers this season. And the postseason is likely to push those figures even higher, especially with the four best home-run hitting teams in history — the Minnesota Twins, New York Yankees, Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers — in the playoffs.
The regular season concluded with a jaw-dropping number of homers: 6,776 launched since Opening Day in late March. The figure passed the previous record of 6,105 homers set in 2017, and the record before that, 5,693 home runs in 2000.
“There is no more putting the ball in play,” San Francisco Giants relief pitcher Tony Watson said. “Now there is only one swing: It’s all or nothing.”
The big swings have led to the shattering of all kinds of records but also to questions about whether baseballs are being manipulated to produce more home runs to help boost the dwindling attendance at ballparks in the last five years.
League officials are likely to hear more talk about “juiced” balls in the postseason, after the Twins, with 307 home runs, broke the Yankees’ single-season team record of 267 homers. The Yankees finished with 306 home runs this year.
Fourteen teams set club home run records this season, while Baltimore Orioles pitchers gave up a league record of 305 homers.
The home run surge led eight-time All-Star pitcher Justin Verlander to promote a “juiced” ball conspiracy during the All-Star break in July. Verlander, an Astros star, told ESPN at the time, “Major League Baseball’s turning this game into a joke. They own Rawlings. If any other $40 billion company bought out a $400 million company and the product changed dramatically, it’s not a guess as to what happened.”
MLB Commissioner Robert D. Manfred disagreed, telling reporters: “There is no desire on the part of ownership to increase the number of home runs in the game. To the contrary, they’re concerned about how many we have.”
Two years ago, league executives commissioned a study to try to explain the home run trend. According to an 84-page report released last year, a group of 10 scientists and academics concluded that the ball’s ability to travel farther was because of changes in the aerodynamic properties of the baseball itself, specifically those properties affecting drag.
Since the start of the 2015 season, the report said, baseballs showed a decrease in drag — the aerodynamic force that opposes the ball’s motion through the air. With less resistance, the ball carries farther. But the study failed to answer a fundamental question: What was causing the change?
“When we figured out drag was the culprit, we were quite happy,” said group leader Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “When we could not find the property of the ball that changed the drag, we were disappointed.”
Nathan and two other researchers went to Costa Rica’s lush, volcanic Central Valley to tour the Rawlings factory, which produces 1.8 million baseballs annually. Their inspection found no evidence that the production, where the stitches of the ball are hand-sewn by 300 sewers, contributed to the increase in home runs, according to the report.
The study relied on data from the 2015, 2016 and 2017 seasons compiled by the league’s StatCast, an automated program introduced four years ago to analyze player movement and athletic abilities.
Balls were tested at the Sports Science Laboratory at Washington State University. They were fired from a high-speed air cannon at a steel plate to measure the coefficient of restitution, the ratio of the final velocity to the initial velocity between two objects after they collide.
Some members of the group expanded the study to include the examination of more than 8,000 baseballs through the 2019 season, Nathan said. He added they hope to have an updated report by the end of October.
The Giants were 26th in the majors with 167 homers while playing home games at pitcher-friendly Oracle Park. In 2019, the stadium had the fewest number of home runs in the majors with 161 homers.
Giants hitting coach Alonzo Powell said the San Francisco Bay winds and dense marine layer contribute to the fewer number of home runs, although the weather conditions did not stop former San Francisco star Barry Bonds from record-breaking numbers.
Bonds, 54, who serves as a Giants’ special advisor, said he was not interested in how the study of fluid aerodynamics could explain how a ball flies through the air. He trusts in god-given talent, he said.
“When you are on the field, there is no machine, no science that can make you do anything,” Bonds said earlier this season. “If I want to change something, I could just change.”
In 2006, Bonds passed Hank Aaron as baseball’s alltime home run leader, eventually ending with 762 homers in a 22-year career. Bonds also broke the single-season record in 2001, hitting 73 home runs to surpass Mark McGwire’s record of 70 homers set three years earlier. Bonds, though, invited controversy because of his connection to the steroid drug scandal in the early 2000s involving the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, or BALCO.
While more players are hitting home runs, none has approached Bonds’ single-season record this year. Pete Alonso of the New York Mets led the majors by setting a league-record for rookies with 53 home runs.
Powell, who won three consecutive batting titles in Japan from 1994 to ’96, said better pitching and the use of analytical models to take away a hitter’s strength by re-positioning defenses has led to the emphasis on the big swing. “They are playing Russian roulette,” Powell said of the batters. “I’ll take my three chances to try to drive the ball. If you strike me out, you strike me out.”