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Sounds like a bit of hot air.
Hotter weather from climate change has played a role in the surge of home runs in Major League Baseball, researchers claimed in a study published Friday.
But despite the onslaught of headlines, the effect was small — and could be chalked up to everything from stronger players to “livelier” baseballs. And a critic noted that minor league home runs are actually down in the same period.
Players hit at least 500 more homers between 2010 and 2019 — roughly 50 a year — because balls fly a greater distance in warmer air, the paper by Dartmouth College researchers argues.
But researchers also noted that there were a number of factors for why players are knocking it out of the ballpark more often, with the biggest factor being the size of the ball and stitches.
In recent years, home runs have become widely seen in the MLB as more efficient than so-called “small ball methods” such as stealing bases and hitting singles.
“Those other factors are definitely more responsible as of now than global warming,” Dartmouth doctoral student Christopher Callahan, who worked on the study, told NBC News. “Certainly the analytics revolution has played a major role.”
“We say that climate change has caused about 500 more home runs over the past 10 years but that’s only about 1% of home runs,” he said.
Still, “all else being equal, warmer air is less dense and a batted ball will carry farther,” Callahan’s paper states. “Air density is inversely proportional to temperature.”
Ballparks expected to have the most heat-enhanced homers include Chicago’s Wrigley Field, Minnesota’s Target Field and Detroit’s Comerica Park, according to the study.
“Places like Wrigley Field will see a lot more home runs in the future, because it’s open air and a lot of games are played in the daytime,”
“And so you get a ton of more [climate-affected] home runs there, but you’ll get a lot fewer in places where there are domes and the games are more frequently played in the evening to start with.”
By contrast, stadiums that likely won’t have to sweat it include indoor venues such as Miami’s LoanDepot Park, Houston’s Minute Maid Park and Phoenix’s Chase Field, the researchers said.
Overall, the number of home runs in the league has risen dramatically since the 1990s, with a spike from 4,186 in 2014 to 6,776 in 2019.
But Roger A. Pielke Jr. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, notes that home runs in minor-league baseball are down over the same period, saying that the study ignored this control group.
“Maybe climate change only has effects in the major leagues?” he wrote. “Silly science is still fun!”
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