HR/G IN AUGUST '25: WHILE WE WERE SLEEPING...

DON'T look now, but...

HR/G veered upward sharply in August of this YOC (that's "Year of Chaos." in case you were wondering),  with taters launching at a rate of just over 1.28 per team per game. 

That's the thirteenth highest monthly HR/G average in major league history.

THE chart at right displays the HR/G since the "crazy year" (2019, when things just went haywire for the entire season). The pattern in 2025 is similar to what occurred in 2023--HR/G crescendoing in August at a level just under the most tatery April in baseball history (that would be April 2019).

(BTW, the data in the two rightmost columns represents the STDEV for HR/G in each season when we compare the monthly values. You can see the deviation ranges from four to nine percent from year to year.)

The escalation pattern for the past 5-7 seasons can be seen in the data at the bottom, where we included 2019-20 (top line) but decided to exclude them (bottom line) for contrast. When we do that, the June-August HR/G averages for the past five years flatten out, and the values for the edges of the season (April, September) decline.

 But as can be seen, there are all sorts of odd anomalies that pop up--note that HR/G in September actually increased over the August average in 2021-22, and took a steeper-than-usual drop last season.

WE don't see this as particularly alarming: it's just a variant of the usual pattern, delayed a bit due to smaller-than-usual jump from June to July that what we'd seen in 2023-24. 

Another reason why we aren't particularly perturbed about it is that runs/game did not spike at a level commensurate with the HR/G uptick.

We were simply lulled to sleep by what was a sluggish July, where the run scoring uptick also lagged behind the HR/G rise.

(Note that the STDEV between monthly R/G levels is a bit less than half what we've seen for HR/G.)

The other reason we aren't too concerned about the August HR spike is that the R/G level it produced (4.71) ranks only 182nd all time (out of 703 total months from 1901 to the present). The 2019 R/G averages in June through August are all in the Top 100, but still far off the pace set when hitters were more attuned to putting the ball in play and not so copiously swinging from the heels.

SO--whither September? We should expect a falloff, but the exact amount is hard to predict. Nationwide hot weather didn't spike until the middle of August this year, and it appears we'll have a warmer-than-average first half of September...so one might want to expect something more like 2023 than last year. =

Stay tuned...