On July 28 in Milwaukee, the Chicago Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber stood at the plate in the fourth inning, down in the count, 1-2. Brewers pitcher Zach Davies tried to sneak a tailing, two-seam, 89-mph fastball past Schwarber, just off the outside corner. Schwarber lunged at the pitch, trying to fend off a third strike. He looked less like a power hitter than a tennis player stretching for a backhanded return. It was the sort of swing that, at best, might produce a bloop single to the opposite field. But on this day, the ball landed 390 feet away in the Brewers’ bullpen for a home run.
“This is just a flick of the wrists,” marveled Cubs TV analyst Jim Deshaies.
“Wow! That’s amazing!” said Len Kasper, the team’s play-by-play man.
Actually, it’s become fairly commonplace. Through July, Major League Baseball teams were on pace to hit 6,712 home runs this season, dwarfing the previous record of 6,105 set in 2017. Through July, MLB players had hit 4,478 homers, more than were hit during the entire 2014 season. In July alone there were 1,057 home runs; the month’s previous record was 964 in 2004.
Understandably, this doesn’t sit well with pitchers, who believe with some reason, that MLB juiced the baseballs to generate more offense. “Major League Baseball’s turning this game into a joke,” Justin Verlander of the Houston Astros griped prior to starting the July All-Star Game.
The rabbit balls complement a trend among hitters to launch the ball higher and generate more carry. Stats geeks refer to this approach as baseball’s “three true outcomes”: Batters either hit home runs, strikeout or walk. Fittingly, MLB is on pace for more than 42,000 total strikeouts, which would set a record for the 12th consecutive season.
On a broader level, however, this dynamic isn’t unique to baseball. Other sports are dealing with a similar problem — namely, their playing fields simply can’t contain today’s modern athletes.
The PGA Tour and U.S. Golf Association, for example, have been helpless in grappling with golf’s “bomb-and-gouge” era. Top professionals have largely forsaken strategy and accuracy in favor of launching the ball as far down the fairways as possible. Even if errant tee shots end up in deep rough, players rationalize that they’ll be closer to the green and a birdie opportunity.
In basketball, there has been an occasional debate for decades about the merits of raising the rim, which has been 10 feet above the ground since James Naismith first hammered a peach basket to a railing in the Springfield College gym in 1891. In a 1967 Sports Illustrated cover story, Wake Forest coach Jack McCloskey, an advocate of raising the rim as high as 12 feet, lamented the fact that big men, even poorly skilled ones, enjoyed such an advantage: “I don’t know another sport where a player can be so dominating and actually lack talent.”
The call by McCloskey and others to raise the rim seemed like a reasonable response to the proliferation of 7-footers. In theory, it would place a premium on skill over height and unclog the area around the rim. But that argument never gained traction.
We’re more likely to see action taken in baseball and golf. Jack Nicklaus, arguably the greatest golfer of all time and one of its most prolific course architects, has long advocated for deadening the golf ball. That’s become a popular argument given that the alternative, continually lengthening courses, is expensive and hasn’t slowed the bombers’ assault.
There has been occasional talk of the PGA Tour adopting a uniform, less aerodynamic tournament ball, but manufacturers who pay the top pros to play their products have fought these proposals. The battle ultimately could be waged at Augusta National Golf Club, which runs the Masters. Club officials share Nicklaus’ concerns and could unilaterally implement a tournament-ball rule.
If history is any indicator, MLB seems most likely to dial back its baseball. The past 20 years have already seen the steroid era, when annual home run totals first exceeded 5,000 and a more recent dead-ball era in response. In 2014, home runs dipped to 4,186 which is the lowest total since 1995.
Last year MLB bought a stake in Rawlings, which makes the official baseball. That fact led Verlander and other conspiracy theorists to speculate that the league changed the ball to generate more offense. But that also means it would be easy for MLB to recalibrate the ball. So don’t be surprised if, in 2020, home runs retreat to a more reasonable level.
Martin Kaufmann has covered sports for more than two decades, including the past 16 years as senior editor at Golfweek.
