BASEBALL:Ian Katz
BASEBALL fans love nothing more than records, and no records more than the home- run kind, but even the most ardent collectors of the sport’s statistical superlatives admit things are getting a little out of hand.
Scarcely a day goes by, it seems, without some home-run record falling. Last weekend it was the team home-run record of the 1961 New York Yankees, swept aside by the Baltimor Orioles. Only Roger Maris’s individual mark of 61 homers looks like it might survive the season.
The fusillade of home runs is more than baseball’s bosses dared hope for. After the misery of the 1994 players’ strike, they desperately needed some pyrotechnics to lure fans back to the ballparks.
But to purists, the home-run glut does not smell quite right.How can it be that almost a dozen hitters could be transformed in the space of one season into veritable Babe Ruths? Why are sluggers who rarely troubled the outfielders now smashhing balls into the stands every week?
In the bleachers, theories are as plentiful as hot dogs. Most popular is the view that the ball has been “juiced” – the sacred recipe of cork rubber, wool cotton and cowhide must have been tampered with.
In the most conspiratorial form, this theory holds that the sport’s bosses have colluded with the ball-maker, Rawlings, to harden the balls manufactured for the major leagues at its plant in Costa Rica.
Less supicious fans contend that, through some conjunction of coincidence and carelessness, balls have been wound tighter with the result they rebound off bats a little more energetically than they did in Ruth’s day.
Rawlings has fielded the allegations of juicing with resigned irritation. “Everything about hitting a home run is variable,” sighed Scott Smith. “The only constant is the baseball, but what do people blame? The baseball.”
To be fair, the bat is being blamed too. Manufactured with the same wood and within the regulation proportions, the lighter bats now favoured by most players taper improbably towards the handle like stretched glass. They snap often, but players say they can swing them quicker at incoming pitches.
It is certainly true that baseball’s panjandrums have historically been almost as willing to adjust their rules to please the fans as those of other United States sports. But ironically the most substantial change made this season – dropping the base of the strike zone from the top of the hitter’s knee to the middle to speed up games – might have been expected to tip the scale s in the pitcher’s favour.
The reduced dimensions of many of the new ballparks built over the past few years provide a more plausible explanation for the home-run boom. In recreating the intimacy of the old-style ballparks, new stadiums such as Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Cleveland’s Jacobs Field have delighted traditionalists and dismayed pitchers. With shorter distances from the outfield fence, balls that would once have been safely caught are now long gone for home runs.
Of course, one theory most often suggested by the hitters themselves, is that sluggers have simply improved more than pitchers.