The Big Bang

Chicks don't dig the hit-and-run. Neither do the corporate suits dropping 55 bucks a night to park their butts in the padded club seats that put them closer to the catcher than the pitcher is. Neither does the editor cutting the nightly TV highlights or the comic-cum-sportscaster who must plumb the lexicon of family board games to keep coming up with chuckle-worthy, Thesaurus-stretching interjections that pass for home run calls. Neither does the andropopping middle infielder or his agent skimming 5% or the owner gladly writing them checks as long as those 10-year leases for taxpayer-financed luxury boxes sell even faster than $5 cups of microbrewed beer.

Baseball never has been more popular, nor has it ever been more one-dimensional. Baseball in 2000 is mostly about the idolatry of the home run, the game's lowest common denominator. For those of you who blinked, in eight quick seasons—scientific evidence irrefutably dates the Big Bang to the 1993 expansion—baseball has dumbed down into a power trip in which strikeouts, walks and stout ballplayers anchored to bases like the kegs they resemble occupy the tedium between home runs that land in swimming pools, porches, antique steamers, maritime craft and anything else short of the clown's mouth, in tricked-up ballparks.

The home run is our instant gratification, as guilty a pleasure as a gallon of Double Fudge Rocky Road. Is it good for us? Who cares when it tastes this great? Who cares that this season stolen bases are down 22% per game and sacrifice bunts are off 16% per game compared to the same figures in 1992? You don't need a Ph.D. from La Russa U. to understand the Big Fly.

Home runs are flying out once every 27.0 at bats, an 11% bump from what was a record rate last year. Homers account for 41.0% of all runs scored, up from 28.8% in '92, the last time anybody played your father's baseball. Says Mets catcher Mike Piazza, "I don't know how many times over the past couple years I've seen rallies with runners on first and second and guys strike out or pop up [because they're overswinging]. Moving up the runners? Forget it. But I'll say this, too: Just as many times I've seen the sixth, seventh or eighth hitter pop one out of the park. So what are you going to do?"

Here is what you are going to do: Go deep, young man. Owners encourage it. The Yankees, for instance, tried to beat Derek Jeter in arbitration two winters ago by arguing that he didn't hit enough home runs. Jeter hit 19 dingers in 1998, more than all but three shortstops in the majors. Three solid postseason contenders this season, Oakland, St. Louis and Toronto, have chucked the traditional pitching-and-defense championship blueprint in favor of simply carpet-bombing opponents.

When home runs come this easy, however, do they begin to lose their attraction? Will you still respect them in the morning? Number 7 hitters in American League lineups in 1998 put up power and on-base numbers that were nearly identical to cleanup hitters from '68. Corey Koskie is the new Harmon Killebrew.

Go back to a more recent year, our baseline season of 1992, and you'll find that 37 players hit 20 home runs. Thirty-seven players had hit that many by the All-Star break this year. If you play every day and don't hit 20 dingers, you'd better get yourself to a GNC store or find another line of work. Of the 112 players who batted 500 times last year, 73, or 65%, hit at least 20 jacks.

Here's why we keep going back to '92: It was the last season before baseball expanded into Miami and Denver. Major league teams needed 74 more pitchers in 1993 than they did in '92. Offensive numbers spiked. Five years later another 55 pitchers were pressed into service when two more teams, in Phoenix and Tampa- St. Petersburg, were added. The slow-moving pitching pipeline couldn't reasonably support the demand for 129 more pitchers in a five-year window, especially not in a culture in which new ballparks (hitter-friendly), umpires (small strike zones) and the baseballs (wound tighter) conspire against them.

The result has been a warp-speed change in the game. Comparing the 1992 season to the first half of this one, the rate of home runs per game has shot up 78%. The echo from the home run boom over the past eight years includes increases in runs (up 28% on a per-game basis), grand slams (82%), walks (18%) and strikeouts, the homer's evil twin (17%).

The game has changed so much that its traditional unwritten rules need to be reexamined. The Giants, for instance, threw at the Rockies' Tom Goodwin last month because they didn't like him stealing a base with a seven-run lead. Such frontier justice might have been fitting in '92, when only once did a team come from seven runs down to win. Halfway through this season, though, 10 such comebacks have occurred.