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MLB Home Run Hitting

September 29, 2005 12:37 AM

I have finished a draft of an article on home run hitting. This follows on, incorporates, and greatly extends my earlier post on the subject. The article is loaded with interesting statistics, but somewhat technical in places.

Some of the main points:

1. Home run hitting is an extraordinary feat, with the bulk of home runs produced by a few players. In this respect, it is like PGA championships, tennis Grand Slams, World Chess championships, scientific citations, the arts, and the movies. I incorporate the Lotka/Pareto/Murray laws of accomplishment in my estimates of the stable distribution of home run hitting. The distribution has infinite variance, an attribute that tells us how little knowledge we have of the limits of this area of human performance.

2. The number of home runs per hit, per player game, and per MLB game have hardly changed over 44 years of baseball. The annual variation is not large and is mostly driven by the great performances of a few players as in the Maris/Mantle year of 1961 or the McGwire/Sosa year of 1999. Or the Bonds year of 2001.

3. The rise in total MLB home runs per year is primarily caused by the expansion of the number of games played per year and by the almost doubling of the number of teams. Each new team added to MLB adds about 163 home runs per season. Each additional game per season, holding number of teams constant, adds just less than one home run to the season total. Home run production falls by about 400 in strike years even when we account for the reduced number of games played in strike years.

· Sports

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