SAN FRANCISCO — The Rockies, even with here by the bay, are a team swimming against tide.
A slugging spike has Major League Baseball on pace for its second-most home runs in the game’s history. Conspiracy theories have rolled in. The ball is juiced, some say. Or it’s wound tighter. Or the seams are wider. Or global warming is drying out the air for easier flight paths.
that the rise of the home run has coincided with the rise in strikeouts. Both have spiked in recent seasons.
“Whatap most noticeable to me now is the lack of contact,” Counsell said. “And because there’s this lack of contact, you’re not going to string together a lot of hits to score runs, so you better hit the ball out of the ballpark. Since itap harder to put the ball in play, with pitchers throwing harder with better stuff, the home run has become instant offense that doesn’t require sequential offense.”
calls this “the height of the Three True Outcomes Era: home run, strikeout, walk.”
The Rockies, though, have actively lowered their reliance on the long ball, trying to score in more varied ways. They ranked second in the National League in home runs last year but have dipped to fifth this year. (They also rank fifth for road home runs.) But they rank third in runs scored.
“We can still slug. But we have the ability to do some other things offensively now,” Colorado manager Walt Weiss said.
“We got derailed on this road trip offensively, for three or four games. But if you look at the big picture, and the overall body of work, we’ve shown we’re capable of scoring in different ways,” Weiss said. “We’re not living and dying on the home run like we have in the past.”
If there’s a correlation between more strikeouts and more home runs — a big if, it may just be coincidence — Weiss would peg it to simple physics.
“Increased velocity has something to do with it,” he said. “The ball travels faster off the bat when a pitcher is throwing upper 90s.”
