Football remains resistant to the increase in scoring in other sports, with even penalties becoming harder to convert
Something strange happened in Major League Baseball last year. Batters on the 30 teams started hitting home runs at an unprecedented rate from opening day in late March and kept it up all the way to the World Series in October. May brought a record for homers in a calendar month. It was broken in June. By the end of the season, MLB’s increasingly traumatised battalions of pitchers had collectively given up 6,776 homers, an advance of nearly 11% on the previous record of 6,106. While professional baseball has more teams now than it did in its early days, the per-game rate of 1.37 was a big step up on the previous record, too.
Theories abound as to the reason for the homer boom, including some that sound so loopy that you desperately want them to be true and others that are downright conspiratorial. A personal favourite is that it might be down to mozzies. It was, so the thinking goes, a bumper year for biting insects in the pastures where the cows that provide the leather for around 160,000 MLB baseballs each year like to graze. Millions of tiny proboscises left millions of tiny holes in the hides, which then acted a bit like the dimples on a golf ball when subjected to a whack from a Louisville Slugger.
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