Climate Change Is Causing More MLB Home Runs

New York Yankee Aaron Judge hits his record breaking
62nd home run of the season last October. Climate
change, believe it or  not, is partly responsible for 
an increase in MLB home runs. 

 Back in 2019, Washington Nationals play-by-ply announcer F.P. .Santangelo faced ridicule when he said he thought global warming was at least partly responsible for an increase in the number of home runs.

Santangelo is now getting the last laugh.  Turns out he was right. 

As NBC News reports: 

"In a peer-reviewed paper publishes in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Dartmouth College researchers said they can connect at least 500 additional home runs from 2010 to 2019 to Earth's human-made warning."

Warmer air is less dense that a cooler atmosphere. Less dense air means a batted ball will carry further. 

NBC continues:

"From 1998, the first season of the 30-team MLB through last year - and not including Covid-shortened 2020 _- the number of home runs has varied annually from 4,186 in 2014 to 6,776 in 2019.

If current climate trends continue, researchers said, there will be 192 additional long balls per year by 2050 and 467 more per season by 2100, researchers said."

Climate change is not the main reason why homers have increase. The Earth's warming is probably only responsible for 500 extra home runs - or about 50 per year - over the past ten year.

A bigger reason for all these extra home runs have nothing to do with climate or weather. 

Analytics operations have strongly encouraged batters to swing for the fences as the best way to score, especially compared to hitting singles or stealing base. 

Still, prior to 1993, the average MLB team hit more than one home run per game, says NBC News. Starting in 1994, all but four seasons have featured an average of more than one per season. 

So far this year, as of a few days ago, there's been 1.19 home runs per game on average for teams.  But remember, the season is young, and it's colder in the spring than it is during the bulk of baseball season over the summer.