Going, Going, Gone. Climate Change Makes Home Runs Fly Out Of Ballpark, New Study Shows

Over the past decade, baseball has witnessed a power surge, as home runs have flown out of ballparks at record rates. In 2019, for example, pitchers gave up 1.4 home runs per nine innings, the highest home run rate for any reason on record, and a 55.6% increase over the 2011 rate. (Through the first five days of this season, batters continued to slug homers at a record pace.) Many fans and pundits believe that this rise in home runs, and an accompanying surge in strikeouts—batters are swinging for the fences—has plagued the game, robbing baseball of “small-ball” action (think singles and stolen bases and great fielding plays) that once made the national pastime exciting. A host of reasons have been offered to explain this trend: livelier baseballs, improvements in player training, batters swinging the bats at angles more likely to lift the ball out of the park. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] And according to a new study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, another factor is definitively at play: the warming earth. An empirical analysis in the journal article, “Global warming, home runs and the future of America’s pastime,” found that after separating out factors like the physical characteristics of the baseball and advanced data analysis that clue batters in to pitcher tendencies, a 1℃ increase in the daily high temperature on the day of a game played in an outdoor stadium increases the...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change Source Type: news