Table of Content
If SB or CS data is missing, the "basic" formula is used. Many historical player head shots courtesy of David Davis. All images are property the copyright holder and are displayed here for informational purposes only.
Votto strikes out the least frequently, with a mark of 6.7 AB/K. Another excellent young player, Bryce Harper, is not shown in Table 2 simply because the list is only the top 10. The HRKAB numbers in Table 1 show that Stanton’s 6.46 is better than all but one of the players who hit 38 or more home runs in 2017. Given the historic nature of the numbers that Stanton put up, this shows that Martinez also had an excellent season even though he trailed Stanton by 14 home runs. This is an example of the advantage of using HRKAB rather than just home runs as a measure of power hitter effectiveness. Martinez’s total of 45 home runs is not that impressive by itself, but using HRKAB shows that his season was comparable to Stanton’s.
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The difference between these numbers is his HRKAB, 6.46. This number means little by itself, but when compared to other power hitters, it gives a measure of the effectiveness of one power hitter compared to another. Table 1 compares Stanton’s numbers to the 10 players with the next highest number of home runs in 2017.
He runs marathons when not watching or writing about baseball. It's not quite that simple, of course, but clearly the humidor is having some affect on home runs. The weather will warm up in the coming weeks and soon it will be stick-to-your-seat humid in many MLB cities. The ball will behave differently because the climate will be different, so the humidor will change the properties of the baseball even more. The home run rate in the 10 parks that used the humidor in 2021 is down 0.7 percentage points.
MLB home runs are way down so far in 2022; here's how the league's recent tinkering deadened the baseball
Mark McGwire possesses the MLB record for this statistic with a career ratio of 10.61 at bats per home run and Babe Ruth is second, with 11.76 at bats per home run. Aaron Judge has the best career ratio among active players with 11.99 at bats per home run, as of October 5, 2022. The purpose of this article is to explore power hitter effectiveness. HRKAB allows us to compare hitters on an apples-to-apples basis. For example, in 2017, Giancarlo Stanton hit 59 home runs and had an HRKAB of 6.46. This number is worse than the 1.40 HRKAB of Barry Bonds in 2001, the year he hit 73 home runs.
This is done by dividing total at-bats by home runs and by strikeouts. For example, in 2017 major-league batters hit 6,105 home runs in 165,567 at-bats for an AB/HR variable of 27.1. There were 40,104 strikeouts, so the variable AB/K was 4.1. A plot of these variables starting in 1903 is shown in Figures 2 and 3. Going into the 2021 season, MLB told teams they could expect a less lively ball for that year.
Career Leaders & Records for AB per HR
There are so many variables in play that are impossible to quantify. How the ball is transported from the Rawlings factory in Costa Rica to each MLB city, how long the ball is stored in the humidor, and all sorts of other stuff matters quite a bit. Every time a baseball warms up and cools down, its physical properties change. Everything in the ball (the leather, the cork, etc.) experiences wear and tear, for lack of a better term. Giancarlo Stanton has the best career ratio among active players with 13.98 at bats per home run. A barrel is essentially the best possible contact in terms of exit velocity and launch angle.
AB/HR continued to decline at a slower rate until 1962, when it bottomed at 37. As pitching gained prominence during the 1960s, AB/HR increased to 59 in 1976. Since that year, AB/HR have declined by about half to 27 in 2017.
HRKAB shows that Olson has the potential to be a very effective, possibly great, home run hitter. MLB wants more contact and more balls in play, and more action on the field in general. The thinking is that, by deadening the ball and making home runs harder to hit, batters will instead focus on contact. The only problem is that adjustment can't be made overnight, and now a bunch of would-be homers are becoming fly outs, and offense is down around the league. Scoring hasn't been that low in a full season since 1980 (4.00 runs per game).
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Interestingly, this is not Ruth’s best year in terms of HRKAB. Roger Maris had a mark of 0.87 HRKAB when he broke Ruth’s record in 1961 with 61 home runs. That was the record until 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa orchestrated one of the most famous home run races in baseball history. Both players broke Maris’ record, with McGwire hitting 70 home runs and Sosa hitting 66. McGwire also beat Sosa in terms of HRKAB that year, with 3.99 to Sosa’s 5.98.
Use this chart to quiz fans of the game as few will know what percentage of at-bats result in a home run, especially on a league by league basis. About Baseball Reference Batting Glossary, Pitching Glossary, Wins Above Replacement Explainer, WAR data archive, BR Data Coverage, Frequently Asked Questions about MLB and Baseball, ... All of that chaos set the stage for the state of the baseball in 2022. Than balls of a similar contact quality were during the regular season. "I thought Bellinger's ball was out,"Dubón told Evan Webeck of the Bay Area News Group after the game.
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