Home Run Redux Ad Nauseam

Dave Paisley

Had enough Home Run Hysteria yet? I bet you haven't, and trust me, it will get a lot more hysterical than it is right now. One comment that I've already heard, and will no doubt continue to hear, is that if Griffey and/or McGwire break Maris' record, they will somehow have had it easy. Along with this notion goes yet another imaginary asterisk beside their name(s).

Pure bunk, I say. If either of those guys (or a surprise contender) beats the record, it will be fair and square.

True, there is plenty of evidence to show that more home runs are being hit now than ever before. In fact, let's look at that right now.

Sure enough, lots more home runs. In the dead ball era, it took about 250 plate appearances before someone would hit a home run. That would be about one every six team games. The abrupt shift in 1920 to the live ball era drops that average to 100, and then quickly to about 60. Apart from a blip during World War II, the trend has been continually downward in plate appearances per homer, stabilizing at about 50 for most of the post war era. That's not quite one homer per team per game. The nineties has seen a further downward creep to 40 AB/HR so that we are now at roughly one homer per team per game.

So it's easier to hit home runs now, obviously. But it isn't much easier to hit a lot of home runs. If that were the case, we would have seen a steady march upward in the home run record, like there has been in the Olympic pole vault record. The fact is, only two guys have ever broken 60, and they did it thirty years apart, the last one over thirty years ago.

In fact, let's look at what it takes to win the major league home run crown in this century. I've taken the peak home runs hit in either league, and created a five-year average centered on each year. This smooths out some of the random fluctuations. The end of the dead ball era is pretty evident around 1920, and WW2 also makes its presence known. However, the expansion of the schedule in 1961 does not correspond to an increase in peak home runs, Maris' record aside.The decline in the early '70s due to the mound changes is quite clear, while the early '80s dip can be attributed to the strike of 1981.

The late '90s is the first time since around 1930 that the peak home run average has been above 50 for three straight years, and it would be higher if not for the strike of 94/95. Still, it's hardly out of line with past history.

So having established that it's not really that much easier to hit a lot of home runs, how come so many more are being hit today?

Looking at total home runs hit each season is misleading, as it mostly measures the fact that hitting for some power is expected from all hitters. For better or worse, athletic conditioning and an awareness that hitting home runs is a sure way to fame and fortune has turned more players into home run king wannabes.

Let's take a look at some key seasons from the past and see how the home run distribution looks among those who played the game. Here's a chart of what percentage of players hit how many home runs during six individual seasons of interest. They are:

1918	Almost the end of the dead ball era.
1927	Ruth's 60 HR season.
1930	The offensive explosion.
1961	Maris' 61 HR season.
1976	The year the offense went to sleep.
1996	The most recent year for which I have these stats.

As an example, looking at the bottom axis of the following graph and reading off from 20 home runs, we can see that in 1918, nobody hit that many, while in 1927 maybe 2% did. By 1996, 12% of all players were hitting 20 home runs.

While not easily read from the chart, the data show that only 30% of players in 1918 hit even one home run. By 1996, that percentage had risen to 75%.

We're interested in the elite sluggers, so let's blow up the bottom of that chart, taking only the top 20% of home run hitters. The 1927 curve shows just how far out of the realm of the ordinary Ruth's season was. However, just three years later, The top 1% was about the same, but there were a lot more players hitting 20 and 30 HR. By 1961, the top few percent of hitters were hitting about the same as 1930, but the percentage hitting 20 had jumped from 6% to almost 10%. However, the1996 curve doesn't show much of an increase 35 years after Maris.

So what conclusions can we draw from all of this? Overall, it seems that there is no definitive evidence that hitting 60 home runs is much easier than it ever was.

But Junior and Mac have their own game to play, and more power to them.