SWAMPED with non-baseball matters of late, but here's a quick look at another HR-related issue ahead of a much more elaborate post coming tomorrow...
This might be the best explanation for how viewpoints about homers have changed in the past six decades. Baseball fans who were born after 1970 might not understand how rare 300+ HR careers were prior to that time--but recall that it took half a century from the origins of professional baseball for a player to hit 30 HRs in a season!
The chart begins in 1935 with the retirement of the first hitter with 300+ lifetime homers (you might have head of him...) and moves upward and rightward until we reach 2020.
In 1935, there were three hitters with 300+ homers in their career (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx). By 1970, there were 27 hitters who'd made the "300 club." Fifteen years later, that total had nearly doubled to exactly 50.
But, as the shaded area displays, that was just the tip of the iceberg with respect to the profusion of 300+ lifetime homer careers. In the twenty-five year that followed (1985 to 2010) a total of 79 more hitters were added to the 300+ HR list. The offensive explosion that began in 1993 and continued relatively unabated until 2009 jump-started this process.
AND it became second nature to most baseball fans for this to happen. Over this time, the sense of rarity that originally was part of the fans' mental baseline with respect to 300+ HR careers was slowly but decisively obliterated. By the late 1990s, when analysts jousted over the qualifications of Dick Allen for admission to the Hall of Fame, some folks were already downplaying his home run total (351). No one at the time bothered to go back in time to explain that when Allen retired in 1977, he was only the 38th hitter to reach 300+ lifetime HRs. Fifty hitters had joined the 300+ lifetime honor list in the twenty years since...
...and twenty-five years later (in the present day) that total is now 159 (as noted in a prior post). That's nearly double what the number was after the 2000 season.
There is just no way that anyone with even the slightest involvement or interest in baseball is going to be able to understand how rare the occurrence was for so long. The mental phase shift is vast, it is complete, and it has changed the game in ways that cannot be overturned. We have to look elsewhere to discover things about home runs that are not compromised by the change in the game that has perturbed the way we look at things now. Stay tuned...
