September 29, 2018: The New York Yankees set the major league record for most home runs in a season in an 8-5 win over the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees had entered the game tied with the 1997 Seattle Mariners—a lineup that included Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Jay Buhner and Edgar Martinez—with 264 homers. Former Boise Hawk Gleyber Torres hit a two-run drive in the fourth inning that gave the Yanks the outright record. New York finished the season with 267 homers, led by Giancarlo Stanton’s 38.
But it’s wild what’s happened since. Six teams have eclipsed the 2018 Yankees record, including the Yanks twice themselves. Four clubs broke the mark in 2019 alone. The Yankees followed their record-setting season by topping that group the following year, launching 306 homers. The current record is 307, set in 2019 by the Minnesota Twins and tied in 2023 by the Atlanta Braves.
A study commissioned by Major League Baseball in 2019 attributed the increase in homers to “manufacturing variability” of the baseballs at the Rawlings plant in Costa Rica, as well as “player behavior”. The latter factor is all about big leaguers swingin’ for the fences. According to a story on the study in Sports Illustrated, “The committee concluded that 60% of the home run surge across 2018-19 could be attributed to an increase in carry, with 40% due to players attempting to hit more fly balls.”
To combat the effect of baseballs carrying farther, MLB mandated in 2022 that humidors be installed in all 30 ballparks to maintain moisture level (the Colorado Rockies had been using one since 2002 to deal with Denver’s mile-high elevation). There was a big dropoff in homers in the majors in 2022, but the total has inched back up since then, closing in on “pre-humidor” numbers—although nothing’s come close to the overall record. There were 5,538 homers hit in the regular season that concluded Sunday. The record is a staggering 6,776 during that infamous 2019 campaign.
A footnote on Torres: he was one of a healthy string of future major leaguers who came through Boise when the Hawks were affiliated with the Chicago Cubs. Torres played for the Hawks in 2014, their final year as a Cubs farm team, but he was just here for the final seven games of the summer after spending most of his first pro season with Chicago’s rookie league team in Arizona. Torres was productive in his brief stint here, hitting .393 with two doubles, three triples and a homer. He spent his first seven MLB seasons with the Yankees and just finished his second year with the Detroit Tigers.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)