The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [68]
In 1996, a record 4,962 home runs were hit. The Orioles themselves hit 257, setting a new Major League record. The Rockies hit 247, tying the National League mark set by both the 1947 Giants and the 1956 Reds. Seventeen players hit forty or more home runs in 1996, and forty-three players hit at least thirty. Mark McGwire hit fifty-two, despite missing thirty-two games with injuries.
The fans and the media and the baseball executives struggled to process these numbers. I worked the All-Star Game for NBC that year and drew up many of these numbers and comparisons for Bob Costas, one of the few media members who warned that something was happening, although he didn’t know what it was.
I wasn’t in the locker rooms, so I didn’t see the creatine, the dietary supplement that was being used in vast quantities. I just saw the numbers. Of course, I had covered the 1987 season as the statistician for NBC, working on the Game of the Week, and home runs had exploded in that season as well. But the next season, home runs went down by almost a third. All the stories in 1987 were that the ball was juiced. In 1996 it could have been the ball, but just maybe it was the players that were juiced.
One of the changes in baseball that Howard Bryant alluded to in Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball (2005) that may have contributed to the increase in home runs was that batters—even leadoff batters—attacked the plate and were no longer ashamed of striking out.
It was something that I had long noticed, and that has continued to this day. In 1992, thirty-four different Major League players struck out more than 100 times. In 1996, sixty-two players reached the century mark in strikeouts. That figure went up again the next year, as seventy-two players struck out 100 or more in 1997.
Major Leaguers striking out 100+ times in a season
1960: 7
1980: 11
1985: 29
1992: 34
1993: 41
1996: 62
1997: 72
1998: 73
1999: 71
2001: 74
2002: 71
It was a red herring for many people, myself included. Players were playing a different game, closer to “Home Run Derby” than conventional baseball. Everyone went up to the plate trying to hit home runs. Look at the numbers:
For baseball fans in need of a good trivia question, the seven players who struck out more than 100 times in 1960 were Pancho Herrera, Mickey Mantle, Jim Lemon, Eddie Matthews, Frank Howard, Dick Stuart, and Harmon Killebrew. Even the best baseball fans will have trouble remembering Pancho Herrera, who sounds more like a tennis player than baseball player.
Herrera was a first baseman for the Phillies. I can use any benchmark, not just 100 strikeouts in a season. In 1960, only fourteen players struck out as many as ninety times. In 1998, however, there were 104 players that struck out 90+ times. Even accounting for many more Major Leaguers in 1998, you can see my point. There were sixteen Major League teams in 1960, and only fourteen players (not even one per team) struck out ninety or more times. That rate would multiply 3½ times in the late 1990s.
It’s not because the pitching has gotten better. If anything, pitching has gotten worse. Pitchers walk more batters, hit more batters, allow more hits, more runs, and more home runs. But they strike out far more batters. Maybe home runs were just hit at a greater rate before because players tried like hell to swing for the fences, which put them