The hitter is hitting a home run on a hot day
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Baseball sluggers have been affected to some extent by climate change. Hundreds of his league home runs wouldn’t have crossed the wall if temperatures weren’t hotter, reducing air density and reducing drag, according to a new study.
“If you’re a fan of baseball, this made an impression on you,” says Justin Mankin of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Mankin and his colleagues examined weather and hit count data from over 100,000 outdoor major league games between 1962 and 2019.
We used statistical methods to separate the effect of temperature from other variables, such as changes in training. We also analyzed over 220,000 ball trajectories recorded by high-speed cameras since 2015 to further isolate the effects of temperature.
They found that an additional 1°C increase in temperature on a given day increased the number of home runs during a game by just under 2%.
The researchers then used climate models to examine temperatures with and without the impact of anthropogenic emissions. Cooler temperatures due to aerosol emissions led to a decline in home runs from the 1960s through his 1995. After that, warming increased his number of home runs, and from 2010 to 2019 he averaged 58 more home runs per year.
In the very high emissions scenario, 467 more home runs are projected per year due to rising temperatures by 2100. In the low-emissions scenario, 130 more home runs are projected by 2100.
“Physics is almost irrefutable,” says Alan Nathan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Higher temperatures reduce air density, reducing the drag on a baseball and allowing it to travel farther, he says.
Commentators have speculated that this effect may have contributed to the home run “explosion” seen from 2015 to 2019, raising concerns that games were becoming too boring. .
But Nathan said the change in home runs due to climate change is marginal compared to other factors, such as hitters swinging to fences more often and the impact of subtle variations in baseball stitching on drag. said. “From a practical point of view for games, it’s hardly worth worrying about,” he says.
But scoreboards aside, rising temperatures will affect players, ballpark staff and fans in other ways, said Brian McCullough of Texas A&M University. “We don’t want to see climate change affect our sport,” he says.
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