Key to Getting in Hall of Fame? Hitting 500 Balls out of the Park

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ^ | Friday, May 16, 2003 | ALLEN ST. JOHN

[WaveThatFlag]

Heard the one about the motorist lost in upstate New York? He pulls into a gas station and asks the attendant, "How do you get to Cooperstown?"

"Hit 500 homers," the pump jockey said, not missing a beat.

It's one of baseball's most sacred numbers and, for the moment at least, it's a sure ticket to the Hall of Fame. But now that Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmiero have joined the 500-homer club, let's take a closer look at who else is aiming for it.

[WaveThatFlag]

Babe Ruth: Height - 6'2" Weight - 220lbs

Alex Rodriguez

Height - 6'3" Weight - 210lbs

No, it's not the balls. The players are just BIGGER today. Riiiiiiight.

[Chi-townChief]

That's too bad - I've always liked the Crime Dog although it does appear as if he's just playing out the string. Kind of reminds of when Robin Roberts just couldn't get to that 300th win.

[Alberta's Child]

The players are bigger, the ballparks get smaller, and the umpiring is so bad these days that the strike zone is geared to a hitter's best hitting zone.

All of which makes for meaningless records in the record books.

It's not much different than changing the rules of NFL football so that the game is played with 11 offensive players on the field and only 8 defensive players, then watching eight players rush for 3,000 yards in a single season and break Emmitt Smith's career rushing record in only seven years.

[poet]

And the pitchers, by and large, should be in the minors with their ERAs of 6+. This, no doubt is due in a large part to expansion, because the more teams, the less the talent.

[poet]

"because the more teams, the less the talent."

As respects quality pitchers.

[AuH2ORepublican]

I don't think the balls are juiced, although the ballparks that have opened in the past 10 years have certainly helped young sluggers. But it's unfair to compare Ruth's home run totals to anyone else's, since he came up as a pitcher in the dead ball era. Had he been 10 or 15 years younger (so he would have first come up in 1924 or 1929 instead of 1914) and been an outfielder from the get-go, Ruth would have hit around 900 homers.

BTW, Fred McGriff will hit his 500th dinger later this year. And he is a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, not just because he hit 500 homers, but because of his 1600+ RBIs, 8 straight 30-homer seasons, leading both leagues in homers, contributions to numerous contending or pennant-winning teams, etc. I agree with the author that 500 may not be magical anymore since, with a little luck and had there not been collusion among owners in the 1986-87 offseason, Dave Kingman would have hit 500 and would have been off the HOF ballot on his first try for failing to reach 5% of the vote. In fact, had Bill Buckner not gotten hurt a few times in the mid-1970s, he would have had a good shot of getting to 3,000 hits (the mother of all HOF tickets), and Bill Buskner, while a good ballplayer, is no Hall of Famer. So magical numbers are not as relevant as before, but the Crime Dog is still getting into Cooperstown within his first 5 years of eligibility.

[SengirV]

Ruth was not 220 lbs. for the last 8 years of his career, he was bigger. And that was not a line of muscle around his gut. Ruth was a man amungst boys during his era, meaning he is an outlier in any kind of statistical analysis.

There are many factors contributing to todays home run deluge:

Juiced balls - 20 years ago the home run leader didn't hit 50, now 10+players hit 50 a year.

Smaller ball parks - Go to a game in Houston and take a look down the third base line and laugh at the Crawford boxes. The left Fielder's set position on a pitch is just about at the warning track.

Bigger players - Ruth's weight was gut and ARod's is muscle. ARod doesn't go out drinking 6 nights out of 7 like Ruth used to. ARod(and tons more) are in the weight room more than Ruth was on a bender(and that's a lot). I'm not trying to bash Ruth, it was just a different day and age. I'm amazed Ruth was able to do what he did given the lack of emphasis on health and fitness.

Like it or not, but a lot of players today poisen themselves with performance enhancing drugs/supplements to play better, and most work out year round. In ages gone by, a lot of players would poisen themselves with alcohol, and physical training only started in spring training.

[T. Jefferson]

To compare players from different eras, you simply compare them to their peers. After Ruth quit as possibly the best pitcher in the majors, in his second year as a hitter he hit more homeruns than any other team in the American League. That's like Pedro Martinez hitting 300 hrs next year. Bonds already has more at bats than Ruth had, Aaron
had 3500 more at bats. Ruth was far better than anyone is today comparatively.

[babaloo999]

Bagwell would probably be over 500 already if he had started his career in Enron , TenRun, Minute Maid Park instead of the Astrodome. I've seen high school fields larger than Minute Maid.

[Alberta's Child]

That's right. If I remember correctly, back in the 80s Glenn Davis was the most under-appreciated slugger in the major leagues because he played half his games in the Astrodome. Hitting 35 HRs as an Astro was the equivalent of hitting 50 HRs on almost any other team.

[Stay the course]

[KellyAdmirer]

Ruth was hitting around 60 home runs when his closest competitor was around 20. Now that's total domination. Nobody since has come close to outclassing his competitors like that. He singlehandedly changed baseball from a league of singles hitters to home run champtions. And he was the best pitcher in baseball for a while, too. He was as important to baseball as Elvis or Frank Sinatra were to popular music, not something you can say about any other baseball player before or since, and certainly not about any current players.

[Colonel_Flagg]

Let's not forget 3,000 hits. That's how Robin Yount got in.

[Loyalist]

And the pitchers, by and large, should be in the minors with their ERAs of 6+. This, no doubt is due in a large part to expansion, because the more teams, the less the talent.

If expansion has diluted the quality of pitching, why shouldn't it also have diluted the quality of hitting and fielding?

[Alberta's Child]

If expansion has diluted the quality of pitching, why shouldn't it also have diluted the quality of hitting and fielding?

That's a good question. I think the answer is that the talent pool for position players is larger than for pitchers. Especially when you consider the foreign-born players. There seem to be more dominant foreign-born position players than dominant foreign-born pitchers these days.

If you really want to see how diluted the talent has gotten at the major-league level, notice how many marginal big-league catchers there are these days.

[Stay the course]

There is some evidence for an expansion effect on home runs, but not until the third expansion in 1977.

If you look at the chart, you'll see a peak around the expansion years of 1961-62, followed by a decline until 1976. The expansion in 1969 brought a brief increase, but didn't halt the overall decline.

When the American League expanded in 1977, an increase began, and it was mostly due to an increase in the AL. The NL began to increase in 1982, but remained significantly lower than the AL most years through the 1990's.

There was a large increase after the NL expanded in 1993, but it was about equal in both leagues. The leagues have been much closer since the NL went to 16 teams in 1998.

The DH doesn't seem to have had any immediately discernible effect on the AL, though it may have contributed to the higher AL numbers beginning in the late 1970's.

[Alberta's Child]

Didn't they also play around with the height of the pitcher's mound in the 1960s? 1968 was the exact opposite of the 2002/2003 era -- Lots of pitching records set that year, and (if I remember correctly) Carl Yastrzemski won the A.L. batting title with something like a .301 average.

The dilution of pitching talent is probably not as big a factor as the others that have been mentioned here. Especially the larger size of the players and the smaller size of the ballparks. It would be interesting to see a graph that could somehow correlate the average size of a ballpark with the number of home runs that are hit.

Interestingly, it's not just the outfield dimensions that play a factor here -- it's the overall layout of the ballpark. The newer baseball-only venues are much better for the game of baseball because they are not geared toward a football crowd, but a lot of those older multi-use facilities were circular in shape and had a lot more area in foul ground. This really works to the hitter's advantage -- I'll bet there are fewer foul-outs today than ever before.

[Poodlebrain]

I think the improvements in physical skills of the pitchers has kept pace with the improvements for hitters. The 90mph fastball was a mark of distinction in the 60's and 70's. Today a pitcher with a 90mph fastball is considered to have an average arm.

The big difference in my mind is that many pitchers are elevated to the major leagues without knowing how to use the inside portion of the strike zone and they haven't learned how to get batters out consistently when they don't have their "good stuff."

Not knowing how to use the inside part of the strike zone is mainly the result of the use of aluminum bats until professional baseball. Too often pitches that would result in outs to batters with wooden bats are turned into hits by batters with aluminum bats. Also, the brushback pitch has been all but eliminated from the game with the warnings and ejections for throwing up and in. So young pitchers have to learn certain lessons later in their development.

Also, with the recent development of specialized roles for pitchers you see guys get yanked so early if they don't have their good stuff that they aren't forced to learn how to get guys out with guile as well as with power. This is also one of the reasons why so many catchers seem to have such poor game calling skills. The game management has reduced the catchers need to think about the whole game to one where he thinks about the current inning as an extreme example.

[Stay the course]

It's certainly true that there are lots of factors involved, which makes it difficult to attribute the changes to one factor or another.

One thing that's interesting is that, even though the long-term trend in home runs is up, it has been very cyclical. The changes are statistically significant given the large number of at bats (around 80,000 per year 100 years ago, and more than double that today). The usual theories about bigger players and smaller parks don't account for the large year-to-year variation, or the big declines from 1961 to 1976 and 1987 to 1992. (At least I don't think parks were getting bigger and players smaller over those periods.)

[Alberta's Child]

Those are excellent points, but you have to consider that there is one factor that will increasingly favor power hitters over pitchers over a period of time -- the larger size of the human body from one generation to the next.

A stronger pitcher may be able to throw harder than an average one, but that doesn't necessarily make him a better pitcher. A stronger hitter will hit a ball further than an average hitter, but it may not make him a better hitter. The statistics seem to bear this out -- the rapid increase in offensive production over the last decade has not resulted in more .350 hitters, but in more extra base hits (especially home runs) among almost every type of ballplayer.