A Short History of Bombs (and Barry)

We tried something new over at our Discord Channel on Thursday … a live podcast with Molly Knight where we talked lots of baseball and opened things up to questions. Don’t worry if you missed it — I’m including the audio below, plus we were just experimenting, but I have to say it turned out to be a lot of fun, and I think we’ll try to do something like it throughout the season.

If you’d like to be part of the very fun Discord channel — 750 friendly members and growing fast — plus get all the JoeBlogs, including access to the thousands of stories in our ever-increasing archive, just hit the upgrade button.

Now, let’s hit a few Ask Joes! If you have a question, you can ask it in the Discord or email us at AskJoe.

This seems a good place to talk about the steroid era for a moment — I know you all LOVE when I talk about the steroid era, but here goes anyway.

For the first 120 or so years of professional baseball, teams averaged one home run per game exactly one time, in 1987, the year of the juiced baseball. If you were not around in 1987, which is WAY longer ago than I want it to be, all I can tell you is that it was wild. I turned 20 years old that year, and up to that point in my lifetime, only ONE GUY had hit 50 home runs in a season. That was George Foster in 1977, another year when the ball was juiced.

That’s the world we were living in.

And then in ‘87, suddenly, EVERYBODY was mashing home runs. I mean, Wally Joyner was crushing homers, Matt Nokes was crushing homers, Mike Pagliarulo was mashing homers, my guy Larry Sheets was mashing home runs, it was a free-for-all all. In The Charlotte Observer, my hometown paper, they began running a chart called "BASEBALL’S BIG BOPPERS,” which showed players who were on pace to hit an astounding number of home runs.

On June 21, the chart showed FIVE players on pace for 50 home runs:

• George Bell

• Mark McGwire

• Dale Murphy

• Eric Davis

• Jack Clark

As it turned out, none of them quite reached 50 — McGwire and Andre Dawson hit 49, Bell 47, Murph 44 — but the point is we baseball fans couldn’t even fathom what was happening. We looked for a simple answer because that’s what we do as human beings, and we found it: The balls were obviously juiced.

The next year, as the story goes, MLB went back to the less juicy baseballs and, what do you know, the home run rate dropped precipitously back to where it generally was in the 1970s and early 1980s (though in 1990 Cecil Fielder did become the second player of my lifetime to hit 50 home runs in a season).

Then, in 1993, the home run jumped back up again — it didn’t reach 1987 heights but there was a noticeable rise. This time, everyone accepted that the reason wasn’t juiced baseballs but expansion. The National League added two teams in 1993 — the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies — and that meant there were a bunch of new big league pitchers who would have been in the minors the year before.

People knew all about the impact of expansion on home runs: The American League expansion of 1961 had led to a huge home run spike and a good-but-not-great player named Roger Maris hitting 22 more home runs than he’d ever hit in another season and breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record.

So that made some sense. Then in 1994, the home run rate rose again — for the second time in baseball history, teams averaged more than one homer per game — Ken Griffey Jr. and Matt Williams, and for a time, Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas and Barry Bonds* were threatening Maris’ homer record. But that 1994 season was cut short because of the strike, so nobody spent too much time wondering about all the home runs.

*It’s funny to me that in the canon of Barry Bonds, he wasn’t a massive home run hitter until after the 1998 season. That’s when he supposedly saw McGwire and Sosa smashing all those home runs and getting all that love and did his now infamous Joker’s “Wait ‘til they get a load of me,” bit. But Bonds hit 37 home runs through 112 games in 1994. Babe Ruth had 36 home runs through 112 games in 1927. Roger Maris had 41 home runs through 112 games in 1961. Bonds ABSOLUTELY might have hit 60 home runs in 1994 had the season played out.

Over the next few years, the home run rate kept going up. But here’s the thing — it wasn’t just home runs. Offense was skyrocketing in every way. In 1996, teams averaged five runs per game for the first time in sixty years. That same year, batters hit .270, the highest in baseball since the ‘30s. In 1998, with the influx of two more expansion teams, batters hit more doubles per game than any time since 1930.

In time — again, we do crave simple answers — the offensive explosion of the late 1990s and early 2000s happened mainly because baseball didn’t test for steroids and players took advantage and loaded up on PEDs. That simple answer has shadowed baseball for 25 years now, and the best players of the era are not in the Hall of Fame, and the most remarkable achievements are viewed now as tainted and embarrassing.

Thing is: There was obviously SO MUCH MORE going on in the late 1990s and early 2000s than players simply taking superdrugs that turned them into superheroes.* There was expansion. There was the addition of Coors Field and other home-run friendly ballparks. There was a shrunken strike zone for everyone except the Atlanta Braves and occasionally Livan Hernandez — everybody talked about it at the time. There was the fact that players en masse were working out for the first time in the game’s history; this went way beyond steroids. There were harder bats and probably juiced balls, pitches were coming in faster, numerous hitters wore armour so they could dig in without fear, on and on and on.

Every serious study I’ve seen about the offensive explosion suggests that steroids might have played a role in a few individuals’ performances (such as helping Mark McGwire stay healthy), its overall role in the home run surge has been vastly, immensely, and preposterously overblown.

All of which finally brings us back to Paul’s question: While it’s obviously absurdly early, home runs do indeed look up a week into the season. April offense tends to be down, and you do see those trends across the board — batters are hitting just .230, singles and triples are inching down into nonexistence — but home runs are flying out of the park. Of course, we look to see if the baseball’s juiced. Of course, we look to see if players are taking PEDs. Obviously, everyone is checking out those torpedo bats.

But, especially in such a tiny sample size, there are countless factors. It was unseasonably warm in New York when the Yankees smashed nine home runs against the Brewers. The Orioles brought in the left field fence this year, and two of the Red Sox home runs on Thursday would not have been home runs last year. Dodger Stadium, which was long viewed as a pitcher’s paradise, has turned into one of the best home run parks in baseball. The Sacramento A’s moved from a famously difficult home run park into a minor-league bandbox. The Tampa Bay Rays moved from their power-sapping dome into the Yankees’ spring training facility.

And so on. And so on. Now, look, everyone is going to believe what they want to believe, and I’m not really trying to convince them otherwise. I’m just trying to make the point that simple answers might be appealing, but they’re rarely useful or right.

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