Sports – FiveThirtyEight — Home Runs RSS



Is A 40-Homer Season A Big Deal Anymore?

The baseball world hasn’t witnessed a home run race like this since the height of the steroid era. When Mets star Pete Alonso set the National League rookie home run record on Sunday, he joined Mike Trout, Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger in this season’s 40-homer club … in the middle of August. According to […]

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You Can’t Have Home Runs Without Strikeouts

The defining characteristics of baseball in 2019 are the home run and the strikeout. Both are at all-time highs as of Tuesday. Make no mistake, the two statistics are closely related — and have been throughout baseball history. This season, as of Tuesday, there are 6.4 strikeouts per homer. The average in the Live Ball […]

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We X-Rayed Some MLB Baseballs. Here’s What We Found.

On 6,105 occasions last season, a major leaguer walked to the plate and hammered a baseball over the outfield wall. The 2017 season broke the home run record that was set in 2000 — the peak of the steroid era — when players hit 5,693 homers, and it built upon the remarkable 5,610 that were […]

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We X-Rayed Some MLB Baseballs. Here’s What We Found.

On 6,105 occasions last season, a major leaguer walked to the plate and hammered a baseball over the outfield wall. The 2017 season broke the home run record that was set in 2000 — the peak of the steroid era — when players hit 5,693 homers, and it built upon the remarkable 5,610 that were […]

Continue reading