It seemed that way when the Detroit Tigers played the Minnesota Twins recently. Over three games, the Tigers hit 11 home runs and scored 45 times, numbers that would make their neighbors, the football Lions, envious. Even the lightweights were hitting: backup catcher Chad Kreuter, who’d managed only two homers over his last three seasons, hit two in three games. “Believe me,” said a witness from the Twins’ front office, “it was scary.”
Sure, it was. But if something happened to the ball, how come the Twins scored only 10 runs that weekend off the Tigers’ notoriously weak pitchers?
That’s the sort of question that can keep middle-aged boys arguing all night. Through the first three weeks, both runs and home runs are up more than 10 percent per game over last year; the Tigers were on a pace to set all-time team records, led by sluggers Rob Deer and Cecil Fielder. While baseball aficionados claim to treasure the pitchers’ duel, the average fan delights in a slugfest. “Fans have more fun,” says Peter Gammons, an ESPN baseball analyst. “They stay tuned in and in their seats at the ballpark-if they actually think there’s a chance their team can come back from three runs down.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” says Cleveland Indians manager Mike Hargrove, whose team batting average has hovered around .300, roughly the same as its winning percentage. “They sure didn’t deaden it.” But Richard Levin, spokesman for majorleague baseball, denies there is a livelier ball. “The ball is the same as it always has been,” he says. Rawlings, which has manufactured the official baseball since 1977, supports that claim. It tests the liveliness of its balls-“the coefficient of restitution,” they call it in the trade-by firing them out of an air cannon at white ash, the wood used in professional bats.
But who would expect the conspirators to ‘fess up? After all, they have always insisted that no one tampered with the ball in 1987 either. That year teams averaged 172 home runs compared with 122 just two seasons before; in 1987, for example, Wade Boggs, who has averaged six home runs in 10 other seasons, hit 24. California Angels executive Whitey Herzog says he conducted his own test back then, unwrapping the ‘86 and ‘87 models and bouncing the rubber cores on concrete. The ‘87 ball skied a couple of feet higher. “You didn’t have to be no scientist to figure that one out,” he says. Gammons is convinced that former commissioner Peter Ueberroth commanded that livelier ball. But this year, absent a commissioner, it’s hard to imagine anyone with the clout to do it. Steve Hirdt of Elias Sports Bureau, baseball’s official statkeeper, agrees that the game’s leaders couldn’t carry it off. “The owners are incapable of keeping a secret,” he says. “If they decided to juice up the ball, the whole world would know about it.”
An alternate explanation for the current hitting surge is league expansion. The addition of new teams in Denver and Miami this season means that about 20 pitchers who otherwise might be toiling in the minors or beginning careers as insurance salesmen have found jobs with major-league teams. “Between injuries and expansion,” says Gammons, “it seems as if each staff has at least two pitchers that you gotta ask, ‘Where in the world did these guys come from?’ “Remember that series where the Tigers beat the daylights out of the Twins? Four of the Twins pitchers spent at least half of last season in the minorleagues.
There’s historic precedent for laying the blame on expansion. Roger Maris hit 61 homers to break Babe Ruth’s record in 1961, the very first expansion year. When Seattle and Toronto entered the American League in 1977, the last previous expansion, the other 12 AL teams hit 658 more home runs than the year before.
Of course, every true fan can come up with other factors that may have contributed to the slugging surplus-such as the vile spring-training weather in Florida, which set back pitchers, who require more time to strengthen their arms than batters do to hone their swings. Then there’s the thin air of Denver, which has always been a minor-league home-run paradise. Colorado Rockies third baseman Charlie Hayes, who hit a career-high 18 home runs with the Yankees in ‘92, is already on a Rocky Mountain high–on a pace for about 40 this season. And, of course, there is always that inexplicable phenomenon known as hot hitters. “The way Detroit is swinging right now,” says Doug Rader, the Florida Marlins hitting coach, “they’d be hitting shot puts out of the park.” And middle-aged guys would be wondering if maybe the bats had been tampered with.
Look: anything that gets people talking about the game is good for the game. In the end, what matters is not whether the ball is livelier, but that the game is.
