On Sunday, 28 of the 30 teams played — the Tigers-Royals game was rained out. And in the 14 games played, there were exactly 15 home runs hit.
That’s all. Fifteen home runs in 14 games, according to young baseball statistician and author Jeremy Frank, is the fewest since 2014, when baseball was very different from the past few seasons. And it’s the fewest for an April day since 1993, which is like 500 years ago in baseball terms.
So what’s the problem? I mean, we all know that the home run thing got out of control, particularly in 2019, when apparently even I hit 27 homers*, and you can say that maybe it’s a good thing to see some balance restored to the game. I’ve long believed that home runs are better as uncommon events; when everyone’s doing it all the time, the homer loses so much of its specialness.
So what’s the problem?
Well, the problem is that if this is a real trend — teams are averaging fewer than one home run per game, and that hasn’t happened since the aforementioned 2014 season — hitters are basically helpless. Home runs (since 2014) have masked the absolute cratering of offense in baseball. Batting averages, hits, triples, these are all at historic lows. Strikeouts, as everybody knows, are at historic highs.
And while the deluge of home runs may have become repetitive, they’re just about the only thing that has kept baseball from going back to 1968, when so few runs scored that the powers-that-be in baseball freaked out and just started changing stuff — OK, uh, let’s lower the mound, and uh, make the strike zone smaller, and, uh, maybe the pitcher shouldn’t hit anymore? And, uh, let’s crack down on those spitballs. Right? And, um, maybe we should call more balks? And, any other ideas out there?
In 1968, batters hit .237 — the lowest batting average on record.
This year — and again, it’s SUPER early, so let’s not jump to any conclusions — batters are hitting .233. That is not out of line from the last few seasons. Last year, batters hit .244, which was the lowest average since, you guessed it, 1968.