SO let's start with the teaser left dangling at the end of Part One of this series (yes, now officially a series--check your local listings...) and note the active player leader list for home runs going into the 2024 season. Note also that, as is so often the case, our presentation is somewhat different than the usual one:
Our list takes you down into the depths of homer totals, if only to point out how certain young players (the two not-so-new "Juniors"--Guerrero and Tatis) have been hyped as superstars but are still a long, long way down this leader list.
But you get the idea.
Giancarlo Stanton turns out to be the new leader, now that
Miguel Cabrera has finally retired. (Given that Stanton has missed ~450 games over the course of his career due to injuries, one surmises that he'd be a lot closer to 500 than 400 at this point.)
And the two players who are likely to join the eleven active players with 300+ HRs alluded to earlier are: Andrew McCutchen (299) and Anthony Rizzo (295).
Note also that the media has decided Shohei Ohtani is already a Hall of Famer, even before his current total of MLB homers climbed to 171 after his second MVP "double-duty" season. It is going to be very interesting to see what Showtime's final career numbers look like when the time comes: if he averages 35 HRs over the next seven seasons, he'll crack 400 HRs; will 3+ plus seasons of excellent pitching be his ticket to a first-round induction?
The player most lost in the wilderness on this list is probably Kris Bryant, who had 94 HRs in his first three seasons (including 39 in his MVP year), but has hit only 88 in the next six years.
Here's the distribution of active players' HRs at the highest level of granularity:
400+: 1; 300-399: 10; 200-299: 19; 100-199: 92
That's a pretty steep distribution, actually. Check out the percentages in each of the four high-level categories:
400+: 0.8%; 300-399: 8.2% 200-299: 15.7%; 100-199: 75.3%
It's a bit tricky to get these for "active players" in past years from the query setup at Forman et soeur, but we'll try to look into this and see just how steep this is in comparison to past snapshots in time.
BUT let's return to the young sluggers of the present day and try to put that historical phenomenon into perspective. Since the "New Juniors" (Fernando Tatis and Vladimir Guerrero) have both just completed their age-24 seasons, let's use that "career moment" to look at how "young slugging" has become an integral part of the game.
We do it with a master list of the top 200 "young sluggers" which gives us a range from 190 (Eddie Mathews, the top "young slugger" if we measure by HRs) down to 53 (five guys, ranging from the non-slugger
Buddy Lewis to
Pete Alonso, who hit 53 HRs in his first season at age 24). The bottom end of the range has a few issues, but it allows us to look at an interesting historical distribution, which we'll get to shortly. First, however, we have a similar table of "young sluggers" in categories, taken down to those who hit 75 HRs by the end of their age-24 season.
It's pretty clear that "young slugging" highly correlates with overall slugging, when you look at the top ten guys--eight of the top ten HR hitters all hit 500+ HRs in their career (and #7
Mike Trout, despite his relentless injury siege in recent years, should still get there as well).
Orlando Cepeda (#11) and
Johnny Bench (#12) slowed down considerably after age 30 and are the guys who couldn't crack 400; we figure that
Bryce Harper, #15 on the list and one of five active players in the top twenty, will easily get past that and has a solid shot at 500 as well.
BUT we were alluding to how "young slugging" has become the hallmark of baseball; the fact that it has done so is not really a recent phenomenon. As the next chart indicates, it got started in the 1950s and took the game by the throat in the next decade, setting a template that has pretty much held firm ever since. (Surprisingly, the only decade where young sluggers were less consistently present was the 1990s, when offense headed toward its peak: veteran sluggers were able to extend their efficiency in that time frame, which will bring the "rage against 'roids" folk out of the woodwork if we're not careful--or even if we are...)
Let's look at the charts and we'll try to explain the truly baroque color-coding on display here:
The chart on the left sums up the homers hit up through age-24 seasons for the hitters in that top 200 we mentioned earlier. The color coding is initially straightforward--nothing for a yearly total under 100, cool colors for totals in the 100s and 200s, then warmer in 300 on up. The warmer colors also capture the years in which the Top 20 "young sluggers" reach their totals, often accompanied by other, lesser young sluggers. The reason why 1956 is colored most darkly of all is because it's the year where Eddie Mathews (#1) and Mickey Mantle (#5) tag-team the game and create the unshakable aura of the "young slugger" that will be burned into the collective consciousness of the media, the fans, and the insiders in a way that is irrevocable. (Note that the total of HRs hit these two by age 24, if tallied together at that moment in time, would have been the seventh highest total hit by anyone in the history of baseball. It remains the top 1-2 punch of any exactly contemporaneous pair of "young sluggers")
The half-decade totals tell the tale: 1955-59 had eight "young sluggers," tied with 1935-39, but things would rev up from then on: the 60s half-decades had 13 each. 1970-74 pushed past that to 14 "young sluggers." The early 80s had a bit of a lull, but 1985-89 is back to 13. It's only in the throes of the offensive explosion where we see a significant slowdown (just seven in 1995-99).
Slugging replaced hitting in the 2000s, which eventually slowed down offense, but not "young slugging," which was in place to stay. Even with a downturn in offense in the first part of the 2010s, the launching pad for "launch angle" pyrotechnics was jumpstarted in 2014, leading to the six most plentiful consecutive years of young sluggers (a total of 22, the most ever--a total that was matched by 2018-23).
The last ten years have seen 36 "young sluggers" make their mark in the game, easily the highest ten-year total ever. That group has hit over 3000 HRs in that time frame, reinforcing the notion that the premium requirement for the game is to seek and develop long-ball prodigies.
AND yes, there's more to come in terms of the great flood of homers--we'll present more of it soon enough--even though doing so makes us long for the plan we outlined awhile ago for four leagues, in which one of them was carefully engineered to look more like the game prior to the 1950s--before the aura of the "young slugger" became baseball's siren call. The chances of baseball's Ivy League "brain trust" of actually doing that, however, is minuscule, given that they are the type of "wise folk" who treat the symptoms and not the disease. But fear not: we'll keep plugging away, hoping against hope for some kind of inexplicable, miraculous intervention...meanwhile, naturally, we'll still feed your habit and provide you with even more recondite distributions about "the big fly", "the bomb", "the tater"--the bete noire of these increasingly w(h)acky times in which we find ourselves coerced to live...
