There Are Still a Lot of Home Runs

After MLB announced they were deadening the ball for 2021, we’ve spent a lot of time chasing the effects of those changes. Devan Fink has looked at what happened to the hits that used to be home runs and compared the total number of home runs per batted ball event in April. But while home run totals are comparatively lower over the short-term, it’s worth noting that there are still a historically high number of home runs in baseball. In fact, as of Wednesday morning, 3.48% of at-bats resulted in a home run, which is the fourth-highest rate in the majors since 1921:

It turns out that as a proportion of baseball’s offense, the home run is as prominent as it’s ever been. While 2019 is still the outlier for home runs as a proportion of total hits, with a whopping 16.2% of all hits being home runs, 2021 has the third highest proportion of teams offense coming in the form of a long ball. The explosion of home runs across the league in the last five seasons makes the steroid era pale in comparison:

Some of this is undoubtedly the result of an increase in the three true outcome (TTO) approach to baseball, a trend FanGraphs and others have explored extensively. The TTO approach steadily increased year over year from 2015-2020. In 2015, approximately 30.4% of plate appearances resulted in a walk, strikeout or home run. By 2020, that had risen to just over 36%. Interestingly, there is a slight drop off TTO at-bats in 2021, with all three outcomes seeing slight declines this season; home runs have fallen off the most:

And the trend towards TTO baseball is evident beyond the majors. Baseball America recently recounted that home runs and strikeouts are on the rise in college baseball and the minors, which gets at the idea that players’ approaches at the plate are shifting across the sport. A slightly different look at this change in approach can be seen by examining the individual players whose plate appearances result in an abnormally high number of TTO results. In a 2015 piece looking at TTO players, Craig Edwards included a qualified leaderboard showing 13 qualified players with a TTO % equal to or greater than 40.5%. As of Thursday night, there are 30 qualified major leaguers who walk, strikeout, or hit a home run 40.5% or more of the time:

Focusing on individual players and home runs reveals yet another way home runs are more prevalent than at almost any time in baseball history – the sheer number of home runs hit by individual players in a given season. Since 1921 there have been 344 individual player seasons where a player has hit 40 or more home runs. I took those seasons and sorted them by year to get an idea of how common a 40-plus homer season has been at any point in the last 100 years of baseball seasons. And if you feel like a 40 home run season just isn’t the feat it used to be, well, you are right. In the 75 years between 1921-95, there were 157 individual player seasons with 40 or more home runs; in the last 25 years, there have been 187 such seasons. As you may expect, the number of players hitting 40 or more home runs in a season peaked during the steroid era, with a record-setting 16 players hitting 40-plus home runs in 1996 and 2000. That pace trailed off considerably after 11 players hit 40 or more home runs in 2006 before rocketing back to double digits in 2019. Because there is a lot of noise in the individual seasons here, I grouped them by decades to demonstrate the growth in the number of players hitting 40-plus home runs:

A couple of caveats about the above chart. First, the 1940s has the lowest number of 40-plus home run seasons due to the number of players impacted by World War II. There were zero 40-plus home run hitters between 1941 and 1945. Second, the 2010 decade data is not perfectly comparable to the other decades because of the shortened 2020 season. Projecting 40 home run seasons off of partial campaigns like 2020, or what we’ve seen so far in 2021, is imperfect. While we can take 2020’s totals and multiply them by 2.7 to get an idea of what may have happened over a full 162 games, that ignores how factors like April and May weather, which is less conducive to offense, may have impacted player totals. With those stipulations noted, it’s still remarkable that from a raw numbers standpoint, a record 17 players were “on pace” for 40 or more home runs in 2020. Adding those 17 players would have kept the 2010s in third for the most 40-plus home run hitters by decade, but would have bumped the decade’s total from the modest 47 it currently shows up to 64. That would still be substantially behind the 87 players who hit 40-plus home runs during the 2000s, but only slightly off the pace for the 1990s, when 70 players had individual seasons with 40-plus home runs. So far in 2021, “only” seven players are on pace for 40 or more home runs. If those numbers hold, 2021 would tie 1969 for the season with the 17th most 40-plus home run hitters in the last century, a far cry from a dead ball era:

Offense has been hard to come by in 2021, with strike outs on pace to set yet another record and the league-wide batting average rivaling 1968’s the Year of the Pitcher. MLB’s pre-season announcement that they were deadening the baseball has led to a lot of smart work tracking those missing home runs. But as we look for them, it’s still helpful to zoom out a bit and recognize that even with the deadened ball we are witnessing one of the best environments for home runs in the history of the game.