Climate change is one factor — along with stronger players and all those power upswings — in the onslaught of MLB's long balls, a Dartmouth study suggests.
Should we save a spot in the baseball annals for the “climate-ball” era? Climate change and its impact on home-run-favorable thinner air may earn a place in recorded history alongside Major League Baseball’s dead-ball era and the notorious black eye on America’s pastime when steroids juiced the power game.
To be sure, there are several factors at work promoting more home runs, a list not lost on the Dartmouth researchers, themselves baseball fans, who ran the study. “There’s a very clear physical mechanism at play in which warmer temperatures reduce the density of air,” said senior author Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography at the school. “Baseball is a game of ballistics, and a batted ball is going to fly farther on a warm day.”Mankin and his team analyzed more than 100,000 major-league games and 220,000 individual hits to correlate the number of home runs with the occurrence of unseasonably warm temperatures.
“We don’t think temperature is the dominant factor in the increase in home runs — batters are now primed to hit balls at optimal speeds and angles,” he added. “That said, temperature matters and we’ve identified its effect. While climate change has been a minor influence so far, this influence will substantially increase by the end of the century if we continue to emit greenhouse gases and temperatures rise.
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