Through a wide lens, looking at the big-picture direction of the game, there’s no question what has been the biggest storyline of this baseball season. It’s not Bryce Harper’s resurgence or the Mets’ misfortune or the Cubs’ poor start or Aaron Judge’s breakout.
It’s the home runs. All 1,923 of them in the first two months of the season.
Not only is Major League Baseball on track to set a record for most home runs in a season, it won’t be close. According to Matthew Pouliot of Rotoworld’s calculations, the league is on pace to hit 5,915 home runs—218 more than were hit in 2000, at the height of the Steroid Era.
Currently on pace for 5,915 homers. All-time record is 5,693 in 2000. 5,610 last year. As recently as 2014, the total was just 4,186.
— Matthew Pouliot (@matthewpouliot) June 1, 2017
Maybe it’s because of the upper-cut swing revolution. Maybe it’s because strikeouts have been de-stigmatized. Maybe it’s because hard-throwing pitchers are less afraid to work up in the zone. Or maybe it has something to do with the ball.
But whatever the reason, it’s clear the long-balls have gone too far.
Unlike in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the faces of the home-run boom were sluggers like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, this offensive explosion is epitomized by role players, guys who shouldn’t hit more than 15 home runs in a season but are on track to whack 30. Did you know Brett Gardner (career-high 17 home runs) has 11 dingers already this year? Or that Marwin Gonzalez, who last year hit 13 homers in 518 plate appearances, now has 12 in 154? Or that Scott Schebler and Ryan Schimpf have combined for 30 already?
You thought it was silly last year when Freddy Galvis hit 20 home runs and Brad Miller knocked 30? Well a third of the way through the 2017 season, Justin Bour has 15 homers. Yonder Alonso has 14. Justin Smoak 12. These are C+ players hitting home runs at a rate previously reserved for all-stars.
Why is this a bad thing?
Well for one thing, the home run is becoming cheap. There’s no excitement in seeing a home run when you just saw one 25 minutes ago. And for all the Steroid-Era talk about the sanctity of baseball numbers, shouldn’t we be worried that 38 players hit 30 or more home runs last year, including the likes of Jedd Gyorko and Yasmany Tomas?
More importantly, with home runs come strikeouts, which are similarly soaring. Hitters are swinging for the fences, resulting in many long balls, many whiffs and not nearly enough balls in play—which are the exciting part of baseball.
There’s no obvious answer to this problem. MLB can’t force its batters to hit more grounders, and it’s not as if you can suddenly move back all the fences across the league. Besides, with run-scoring not especially high as is, a drastic change like raising the mound could swing the game back toward the dangerously low-scoring days of the early 2010s, before balls started flying over the walls.
But the first step to a solution is admitting you have a problem, and Major League Baseball definitely has a problem.
