Albert: What’s causing the 2019 home run explosion?

From Jim Albert at WordPress on August 19, 2019:

It should be obvious to all baseball fans that 2019 is a crazy season for home run hitting. The interesting question is why. Specifically, what is driving the home run increase? Some talks at Saberseminar focused on the change in the baseball. I don’t dispute the role of the composition of the baseball. In fact, in the work of the MLB Home Run Committee, we found that there was clearly a reduction in the drag coefficient that was contributing to an increase in home runs from the second half of the 2015 season through the 2017 season.

But this doesn’t mean that the change in the baseball is the sole contributor to the home run increase. The point I was trying to make in my Saberseminar talk is that there are several plausible causes for the home run explosion and these other causes (that is, the ones not due to the baseball) may also be playing a big role in the home run phenomenon. Let’s focus here on non-ball reasons for the increase. This post will also be useful in explaining my statistical method for predicting home runs from one season to the next season.

Read the full article here: https://baseballwithr.wordpress.com/2019/08/19/whats-causing-the-home-run-explosion/



Originally published: August 20, 2019. Last Updated: August 20, 2019.