For the last few years, baseball fans have wondered what drove the spike in home runs. Juiced balls? Juiced players? Lousy pitching? Players just naturally bigger and better than those of other eras?
According to Dartmouth College, it’s global warming.
According to a study by Dartmouth researchers, climate change has added more than 500 home runs to Major League Baseball since 2010. The study was published Friday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
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According to the study’s abstract, researchers analyzed 100,000 MLB games and 220,000 “individual batted balls.”
The conclusion: “Myriad factors likely account for these trends, with some speculating that global warming has contributed via a reduction in ballpark air density.”
The “some” in that sentence would presumably be the climate alarmists who want us to believe that global warming affects everything. In fact, that would be these Dartmouth researchers.
As their study noted, “Our results highlight the myriad ways that a warmer planet will restructure our lives, livelihoods, and recreation, some quantifiable and easily adapted to, as shown here, many others, not.”
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The gist of the study is that “higher temperatures substantially increase home runs.”
After isolating “human-caused warming” with climate models, they claimed that at least 500 home runs MLB batters hit since 2010 “are attributable to historical warming.”
And for the future, pitchers beware.
“Several hundred additional home runs per season are projected due to future warming. Adaptations such as building domes on stadiums or shifting day games to night games reduce temperature’s effects on America’s pastime,” the study argued.
“Without gameplay adaptations, future warming will intensify this effect alongside other climate impacts.”
The problem for the study is the same with most such research: facts.
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For one thing, baseball teams already play about two-thirds of their games at night. That means there should have been more home runs when games were played almost exclusively in daytime. Yet that didn’t happen.
As it turns out, global warming was also responsible when MLB teams hit fewer home runs.
“We find that human-caused climate change decreased home runs between 1962 and 1995 and increased them thereafter,” the study says, attributing that to the “high atmospheric loading of anthropogenic aerosols” that “cooled regional climate from the 1960s through the 1980s.”
And it appears building domed stadiums doesn’t help.
The teams in Houston, Toronto and Milwaukee, all of whom play in domed stadiums, have routinely been among the teams with the most home runs in a season.
Then, as CNSNews.com pointed out, the study made another incoherent point: as air quality got better, the air also got warmer, generating more home runs.
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“Policy changes aiming to improve air quality succeeded, so greenhouse gas forcing has dominated recent climate changes, accelerating home runs,” the study said.
But the biggest obstacle to the research is that the number of home runs actually decreased last year.
Ballplayers hit 5,215 home runs in 2022, which was the lowest total since 2015, other than the COVID-shortened season in 2020.
Fox Sports reported that the 729 dropoff in home runs between 2021 and 2022 was the biggest plunge in MLB history.
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