THE TORPEDO KERFUFFLE...

CAN baseball provide enough of a distraction in 2025 to make folks forget about the short-porch fascism surrounding us? Our previous prelude to the current age of total prevarication brought us a strange form of iambic lunacy as sluggers and chuckers waged a Tik-Tok war centered around "launch angle" (presaging a series of real-life wars that managed to push the "war over WAR" into the background). 

The HR/G values have ping-ponged over the last ten years in a surreal fashion, as a rift zone opened across the game, with the long ball emulating the horrendous dumbed-down momentum of American politics and culture in its omnivorous overreach. And the 2025 baseball season has begun in a harrowing emulation of the "flooded zone" malevolence we see in Washington DC, a kind of kudzu of ketamine-stoked aberrance. Where the fascist pols have their Executive Orders, baseball has its torpedo bats.

AND it's the former Evil Empire (the New York Yankees) who've thrust themselves into the "muskrat love" role of insurgent with its long-ball barrage--fifteen home runs in three games, paralleling the bureaucratic blitzkrieg that currently plagues the nation. Those new-fangled bats are the latest in the wars of technology that rage like wildfires in the heaving hinges between Europe and Asia, and their explosive entry onto the scene might wind up dominating the discourse about the game in 2025. 

Will HR/G move back in the direction of 2019--the most absurd season in the history of baseball? Of course, it's too soon to tell, but we can at least put the early-season bombings in the Bronx into historical perspective while we wait for the additional shoes to drop...

THAT three-game barrage is the place to start. As an opening-season salvo, it created an astonishment that riffed through the media with the headlong force of a pandemic. It was instantly proclaimed a record--and it was, at least for the first three games of a season. But as is so often the case with such things, there was little to no follow-through to determine just how record-setting that fifteen-HRs-in-three-games thing really was. 

And that's (of course) where we come in, taking the call on the red phone while we were distracting ourselves with the saucy teases at OnlyFans (another ledger entry in the "any port in a storm" department...) and springing into action faster than Signalgate can make a pancake-makeup President into a torpid human torpedo to provide hard data to a nation still reeling from the unelected consequences of its November calamity.

FIRST, what the Bronxsters did over the past weekend is not an all-time MLB record for the most HRs hit by a team in three consecutive games. The chart (at right) tells us that the record actually belongs to another Yankee team, set in 2020, the pooped-up "pandemic season" that was the grimly appropriate followup to the folly of 2019 (aka "Launch Angle Hell"). The record is actually nineteen (19!).

Those three days in September 2020 seem to have passed without anyone acknowledging this prodigious post-lapsarian feat. But now at least we can see that while what happened this past weekend is rare (only the seventeenth time that it's happened in baseball history) it was not a singular bomb-dropping moment a la the Enola Gay (and let's hope that the hockey pucks handling the Pentagon web site will see fit to restore the image of that fateful airplane that reminds us of the peril still casting a shadow over us: if we are going to purge anything, let's purge homophobic stupidity once and for all, shall we?)

The chart shows that fourteen of the seventeen incidences of "bombs away" cluster-tatering have occurred since the advent of the offensive explosion--which crossed a threshold in HR/G values. Those have managed to remain even as the other aspects of the explosion have withered away...

WHEN we look at the nine homers hit by the Yanks on Saturday March 30, we should keep in mind that the temperature that day was unseasonably high (78 degrees at game time) and that there was a wind blowing out to CF at 15mph. We might figure that several of the HRs hit there on that day were aided by the wind, and that on a normal early spring day, four or five of them might have stayed in the ballpark. While that will immediately be seen as overly speculative by the very folks who will likely spend much of the 2025 season identifying all the HRs hit with torpedo bats, we're going to run with it for purposes of illustrating just how prevalent three-game stretches in which a team hits ten or more homers have become in baseball since the 1990s.

The TimeGrid™ table (above left) makes clear just how common such occurrences have become; the heat-map coding displays how it slowly evolved, hitting an unexpected peak in 1987 (the first "year of the homer") and gaining momentum in the 1990s and 2000s. There was a bit of a lull from 2007-2014, but things heated up once the dotard descended that damned escalator, leading inexorably to 2019, baseball's year of ultimate absurdity.

2021-2024 has the oscillating ("iambic," as the late Brock Hanke would say) pattern as the "post-launch angle war" continues, with interchangeable roles: sometimes the hitters are the Israelis, sometimes they're the Palestinians; sometimes the pitchers are the Russians, sometimes they're the Ukranians. (As Ray Davies noted back in 1970, it's a mixed-up world and we await the first slugger on the baseball diamond named Lola.)

AND just to show you how prevalent the 10+ HR in three consecutive game thang has become in our Phangraf-infested age, here are the franchise totals for such events. Surprisingly, the Bronx Bombers are currently second on the list: but they're just one behind the Braves and it will be quite a disappearing horsehide race between them (if, of course, you're into such things.

Please note that grand total at the bottom of the chart: a team hitting 10+ homers over three consecutive games is, at this point in baseball history, decidedly not a rare event. Granted, 1183 incidences is only about one-fifth as many sexual liaisons as the prolific French crime novelist Georges Simenon claimed to have had over his lifetime, but it's still a considerable number and we should note that their escalation over the past thirty or so years can properly described as markedly promiscuous...

OF course those who lust for precedent-shattering still have hope on this April Fool's Day for something the world has never seen before (which is definitely not to see the White House invader without his Mop'n'Glow complexion--cue dance of the horror emojis). The two-game HR total for the Bronx Bombers, whose next game occurs in a few hours, is currently at 13. Thus if the torpedo men (and Aaron Judge, who's doing it with his usual "toothpick") can roll a "seven" tonight, they'd eclipse their 2020 record with 20 homers for three consecutive games (#s 2-3-4 of the already cacaphonous 2025 season). 

As our last chart (at left) shows, these Yanks are already in a ten-team tie for the most HRs hit in two consecutive games. And so the record-chasers have an additional cheap thrill potentially available to them tonight: if the law firm of Volpe, Wells, Chisholm and Goldschmidt (torpedo lawyers one and all...) can launch just five homers tonight, that will set a new record for most HRs by a team (14) in two consecutive games. They would break the record that their 1939 brethren set in a single day across a doubleheader en route to a fourth consecutive World Series win (a year in which the priapic Simenon apparently had 583.7 sexual encounters, if we take his yearly average and adjust for "park effects"). 

SO...hope (or something somewhat grotesquely similar) springs eternal as we enter "the cruelest month," at least for those who need to sustain the overweening over-indulgence in tater-tot baseball. Will the Yankees scratch that itch? Or will the Diamondbacks' Corbin Burnes, with his "U-boat slider," put a stop to this madness? Even if he does, it will probably be only a temporary respite from a game still vulnerable to "launch angle's" siren song...as we are contractually obligated to say at this point: stay tuned...

POSTSCRIPT: The Yankees hit three more homers tonight in New York, bringing their total in Games 2-3-4 to sixteen, making that trio of games into the  eighteenth member of the 15+ homer-in-three-games "family." Arizona rallied for five runs in the eighth inning behind a grand slam from Eugenio Suarez to hand the Bombers their first defeat of the season (final score 7-5). With Saturday's nine-homer game out of the current sequence, it will take something extraordinary to bring this issue back to the forefront, but we'll be watching the HR/G averages as they evolve over the course of 2025...