« Health Savings Accounts and Medical Choice | Main | Odds and Ends »

Home Run Hitting

September 22, 2005 08:48 PM

Here is a brief note I wrote on home run hitting from 1959 through 2004. The data come from Baseball1.com, The Baseball Archive. This is a great source.

In the note you will see there is no evidence of increased home run production for nearly all the hitters but a few elite home run hitters. There is no increase in home runs per hit in the 20th, 50th, 70th, and 90th percentiles over these years. Only the maximum home runs in a season shows a brief spike during the huge years Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds had, along with Sammy Sosa. Nobody has achieved the consistent home run hitting of Mark McGwire, from the first year of his career to the end. No one has come close, except for the Mighty Mac himself, to equalling his feat: half of his hits were home runs in 2001. In his record setting year of 70 home runs in 1998 forty five percent of his hits were home runs. Read the whole thing (7 pages) in my note Home Run Hitting.

· Sports

Comments

Posted by: Hydrocodone [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 3, 2006 12:59 AM

Posted by: Hydrocodone [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 30, 2006 2:11 AM

Hello all

Posted by: Hydrocodone [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 30, 2006 2:10 AM

Yes, that is my point. I was not looking at total productivity.

McGwire stands alone in power. I will look at older stats soon to see how The Babe, Jimmy Foxx, Hank Greenberg and so on stand up.

I will say again, it is not steroids. In fact, if you look at the graph you will see that only in recent years have hitters returned to their power of the 60s and 70s. I think we are blessed with some exceptional hitters and ought to enjoy the ride. These sorts of feats only come around so often.

Posted by: Art [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 24, 2005 4:24 PM

re: Barry Bonds

"Hitting for a higher average than McGwire and playing a bit longer have helped his total production." (from the PDF note)

Not quite. Bonds has both a higher career OBP *AND* SLG than McGwire. And if "total production" can include fielding too, Bonds has 8 Gold Gloves.

To borrow a term from the sabremetricians, I believe McGwire has more "isolated" power than Bonds.

Posted by: dfobare [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 22, 2005 10:38 PM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?