Will home runs continue at absurd rates when baseball returns?

Pete Alonso led MLB with 53 homers in 2019.

Editor's note: I apologize for the radio silence on this blog as of late. I don't want to get caught up in the speculation of whether there will be a 2020 baseball season. I don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows, so why spend any time on it? I will try to do a better job in May of posting things that I find interesting about the great American game.

One of the things I'll be watching when baseball returns is whether home run totals continue to spike in video game-like fashion, as they did in 2019.

Most of us already are familiar with the absurd numbers. The 2018 New York Yankees set a single-season home run record, hitting 267 as a team. That record lasted one year, as four teams surpassed that total in 2019.

The Minnesota Twins hit an almost-unbelievable 307 homers as a team, followed by the Yankees (306), Houston Astros (288) and Los Angeles Dodgers (279).

Individual home run totals reached ridiculous heights as well, with 58 players totaling 30 home runs or more. How much of an outlier is that? Consider this chart:

Players with 30-plus home runs
2019: 58
2018: 27
2017: 41
2016: 38
2015: 20

A whopping 31 more players hit 30-plus homers in 2019 when compared to 2018. That total of 58 is even more than 2000, perhaps the height of the steroids era, when 47 players topped the 30-homer plateau.

Then there's this:

Players with 40-plus home runs
2019: 10
2018: 3
2017: 5
2016: 8
2015: 9

Ten players hitting 40-plus homers in 2019 pales in comparison to 2000, when 16 guys reached that milestone. But it's still a significant jump to go from three 40-home run hitters to 10 in one year's time.

Here's something else crazy to chew on while you're waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic: Before 2019, only 47 teams in the history of Major League Baseball hit 226 home runs in a season. In 2019, the league *average* was 226 homers -- that's equivalent to 25 home runs per spot in the batting order.

We already know we won't have a full 2020 season to use as a point of comparison, but if baseball resumes and we have, say, a 100-game season, if you see teams getting up to 140 or 150 home runs as a lineup, that's about the threshold where we'll be able to say the long-ball trend has continued.