The Home Run And The (Exaggerated) Demise Of Baseball
Today, one of our authors puts the alleged "danger of dingers" threatening our National Pastime into a bit of perspective.
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Pregame Pepper - Connecting Over A Home Run
Leading Off
The Home Run And The (Exaggerated) Demise Of Baseball
By William H. Johnson
“Baseball is pitching, 3-run homers, and fundamentals.” - Earl Weaver (back in the halcyon 1980s)
It has almost become a meme for baseball fans, that of baseball writers examining the rate of home runs hit in major league ballparks over the previous decade and strikeouts from game-to-game, at a pace that far exceeds any equal time block in the history of the sport, and then lamenting the slow-pitch-slugfest, three-true-outcome nature of the modern game. Worrying about how the unsophisticated, video-game, highlight-centric style of baseball will eventually lead most of us to spend our discretionary sports attention on other activities. Cornhole, anyone? As proof, here are a couple of quotes from ex-players and writers as examples:
A: “(The modern fan) has the privilege of watching a group of highly efficient players who have studiously perfected themselves as baseball machines, for the sake of earning the fabulous salaries of these days.”
…and…
B: “Home runs are ruining baseball.”
Those quotes do seem to capture some of the more negative feelings toward the game on the field, in part nudging the Baltimore Orioles to effect an exaggerated remedy of moving their left-field fence farther away from home plate in an effort to turn some of the big flies into long outs. Major League Baseball has dictated that clubs keep their baseballs in humidors this year to deaden even the hardest hits. They have even been rumored to have baseballs with differing composition and construction, managed with the purpose of either deadening or enlivening the ball as desired. The expression ‘elevate and celebrate’ is a bumper-sticker summary of the launch-angle phenomenon about which so much has been written and “chicks dig the long ball” was just a more recent, advertising-friendly expression of much older thinking.
But will the trend toward ever-increasing homerun totals actually damage the sport? Can we see the abyss from here? Perhaps. But here is some perspective: Neither of the above quotes about home runs and baseball’s impending doom was uttered in the last ninety years. The first one, “A”, appeared in the May 29 issue of Literary Digest…in 1918. Quick math shows that to be over 100 years ago. Hall-of-Famer Pie Traynor uttered “B” eleven years later, in 1929.
Still, cherry-picking old quotations is a bit of a dodge. Perhaps some more recent remarks will put a finer point on the discussion. “The homer binge will ruin the game…” is a good jumping-off point, as is “Everybody’s hitting home runs, and everybody’s striking out.” Oh, wait. The first one came from two-time American League Batting champ Pete Runnels in 1962, and the second is lifted directly from a May 1962 Sport magazine article about the impact of home runs on baseball.
As with so many ‘current’ events, history offers either precedent or, at least, a modicum of hope for the future. Baseball has been here before and weathered the storm. In 1920, Babe Ruth – by himself – outhomered every other team in the major leagues. The following year only six teams (in addition to Ruth’s Yankees, of course) exceeded his total of 59 home runs. The players and pundits raised to excel in the previous generation’s style of play, the Deadball Era, criticized and lampooned the simplicity of the home run. Ty Cobb labeled Ruth as unsophisticated, and the home run as more of a blunt instrument than a finely calibrated tool for use on the diamond. A great deal of printer ink was sacrificed in sports pages decrying the moral illegitimacy of the home run, and the potential damage it could do to the game.
And still, the game has thrived. It has survived economic Depression, two World Wars, the 1918 influenza epidemic, the younger-brother version in 2020, and a catalog of other maladies.
More from Sport magazine in May 1962:
“Everybody’s hitting home runs and everybody’s striking out. In 1961 Sandy Koufax, a pitcher with an indifferent career record, broke the National League strikeout record, set in 1903 by Christy Mathewson, who pitched 111 more innings.”
In 1968, the so-called Year of the Pitcher, Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA underscored the need to change the height of the mound in order to restore some advantage to the offense. The baseball front office did so, and the game grew.
Home runs and strikeouts may be the current points of interest and emphasis when assessing the state of baseball in mid-2022, but in ten years it will certainly be something else, perhaps something no one is seriously considering right now. In other words, the tension between homers and strikeouts, between offense and defense, has always been a constructive one. It is almost axiomatic to state that the game has not changed. Fans raised in any particular generation of the game (think Deadball / post-war / the ‘60s / today / any taxonomic structure you’d like to apply) tend to see the sport’s evolution defined in terms and units of change from each of our unique perches. But the game will always change. The time for real concern will arise if or when baseball ever stops adapting. Not all ideas are good ones, but even for the bad ones (e.g. the extra-inning “Manfred man” on second), hey, wait a few years. It’ll probably change again.
IBWAA member W.H. “Bill” Johnson has contributed to SABR’s Biography Project, written extensively on baseball history, and presented papers at related conferences. Bill and his wife Chris currently reside in Georgia. He can be contacted on Twitter: @BaseballStoic.