Episode – 2051 : Home Runs
Podcast Transcript
One of the most dramatic events in sports is the home run. In a single instant, leads can change hands and games can be won or lost.
Yet the home run hasn’t always been what it is today. The rules surrounding home runs have changed, in some cases dramatically.
Perhaps the biggest change has been the strategy surrounding home runs. Advanced statistical analysis has changed the approach to home runs so much that the game wouldn’t be recgonizable from someone in the late 19th century.
Learn more about home runs, how they have changed, and how they have influenced the game of baseball on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The origin of this episode dates back to the first list of 100 ideas I had when I launched the podcast in 2020.
One of the ideas came from a book by a baseball researcher named Bill Jenkinson titled The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs. That idea has been sitting at the very top of my list for years, and every time I open up the file, that idea has been staring me in the face.
In the book, Jenkinson detailed Babe Ruth’s 1921 season, unquestionably one of the greatest seasons in baseball history. He went through every game he played in the entire season, read the write-up from every sports writer, and included all the exhibition games against other major league teams.
His argument was that if Babe Ruth were playing a modern schedule, in modern ballparks, with modern rules, he would have hit 104 home runs in 1921.
It was a very interesting read, but for years, I struggled to find a way to turn it into an interesting episode.I finally realized that what was interesting was the changes in rules, ballparks, and strategies that changed the game and the approach to home runs.
So with that….
In the mid-19th century, when organized baseball was first codified, the home run scarcely existed as a strategic concept. Early rules did not even guarantee that a ball hit over the fence would count as a run.
In many cases, spectators were expected to retrieve balls hit into the crowd, and the batter could continue running until the ball was returned. What later became known as the “ground-rule home run” was originally just an extension of aggressive baserunning.
Outfields were vast and irregular, fences were often nonexistent, and balls were soft and inconsistently manufactured. Hits that would later be routine fly outs or home runs were instead rolling balls chased down by outfielders.
Moreover, in the very early days, a batter was out if the ball was caught after one bounce, so hitting long fly balls was often discouraged.
Scoring emphasized getting on base and speed rather than raw power.
By the late 19th century, professional leagues such as the National League began to standardize fields and equipment, and the concept of a fair ball clearing the outfield boundary for an automatic run gradually took hold.
Even then, home runs remained uncommon. The “dead-ball era,” which lasted roughly until 1919, was defined by heavy, loosely wound baseballs that were used for entire games and became soft, misshapen, and darkened with dirt and tobacco juice.
Pitchers were permitted to scuff, spit on, and otherwise manipulate the ball, making it difficult to hit with authority. Strategy centered on bunting, hit-and-run plays, stolen bases, and manufacturing single runs. League leaders often finished seasons with fewer than ten home runs.
Many home runs of this period were inside the park home runs where the ball didn’t clear the outfield wall. They were just glorified triples where the batter literally would run to home.
The single season home run record was set in 1884 by Ed Williamson of the Chicago White Stockings who hit 27 home runs. That record stood for 35 years.
That record was finally broken in 1919 by a young pitcher/right fielder for the Boston Red Sox, Babe Ruth, who hit 29.
1920 saw a radical change in how home runs were perceived. Babe Ruth, now playing for the New York Yankes, demolished his previous single season home run record with 54. This turned the game of baseball on its head.
Ruth hit more home runs than every other TEAM in the major leagues save for the Philadelphia Phillies, who hit 64.
In 1921, Ruth hit 59 home runs in one of the greatest seasons ever, and at the age of just 26, he became the career home run leader with 162 home runs at the end of the season.
There were several rules surrounding home runs in 1921 that are different from those today.
The first is that if a ball went over the outfield wall in fair territory, but then curved into foul territory, it was considered a foul ball and not a home run.
Second, if a home run ended a game, it was not necessarily recorded as a home run. Only enough bases necessary to drive in the winning run were awarded.
Finally, if a ball bounced over the wall, it was considered a home run, unlike today, where it is a ground rule double.
The other major difference was the ballpark dimensions.Many parks built around 1900 had enormous outfields by modern standards. The center field wall was as far as 460 to almost 500 ft from home plate. For example, League Park in Cleveland originally had 460 ft to center field and 385 ft to left before its 1910s reconfiguration.
Most famously, the New York Polo Grounds, which was home to both the Giants and the Yankees until 1923, had a notch in center field that was 483 feet, the furthest distance of any field in history.
This was offset by very close right and left field walls. The right field was 256 feet, and the left field was 279 feet.
Only five players in history ever hit a home run in dead center field in the Polo Grounds: Babe Ruth, Luke Easter, Hank Aaron, Lou Brock, and Joe Adcock.
The dimensions in early ballparks were not gimmicks. Early baseball parks were squeezed into city blocks, rail yards, and odd parcels of land. Before standardized rules, teams accepted radical asymmetry as part of the game.
Only in the mid-20th century did MLB begin enforcing minimum distances, gradually eliminating the most extreme cases.
One debate that has always surrounded home runs is who hit the longest home run in history.
Today, major league ballparks use the Statcast system, which uses radar to measure a ball’s velocity and trajectory to estimate its distance.
For decades, however, we only had anecdotal stories of massive home runs. This led to absurd measurements, often based on where a ball came to rest after rolling.
What modern measures show us is that 500-foot home runs are very rare. In 2025, there were zero 500-foot home runs in Major League Baseball. The longest was 495 feet by Nick Kurtz of the formerly Oakland, sort of Sacramento, and soon to be Las Vegas A’s.
Prior to the Statcast era, the best-documented moonshot home run was hit by Micky Mantle. He hit a home run estimated at 565 feet that cleared the left-field bleachers at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC, and landed far outside the stadium.
This was aided by a favorable wind. Griffith Stadium’s deep dimensions make the estimate plausible, and multiple witnesses corroborated the distance.Some initial estimates placed the distance at 634 feet, but they have largely been debunked.
Reggie Jackson hit a towering home run off the light tower at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium in the 1971 All-Star Game. It was estimated at 520 to 530 feet. This is one of the most visually convincing long home runs ever captured on broadcast video, lending credibility to the estimate.Likewise, Babe Ruth probably hit more 500-foot home runs than anyone in history. One of his longest, and the one recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records, was hit on July 18, 1921, in Detroit. It is estimated at 575 feet.
The longest verified home run ever hit in competitive play was hit on June 2, 1987, by Joey Meyer of the AAA Denver Zephyrs. Playing in Mile High Stadium in Denver, his home run was measured at 582 feet.
Given the high altitude in Denver, there is less air resistance, which makes it the ideal place to hit record home runs.
Under ideal but still physically plausible conditions, physicists and baseball researchers converge on a maximum range of about 550 to 600 feet, which is in line with the longest home runs ever hit.
A hitter swinging at the extreme upper limit of human capability can produce a bat speed around 80 to 85 mph, yielding a maximum exit velocity for the ball of near 120 to 125 mph.
Muscle force, reaction time, and injury risk impose hard biological limits. The ball itself also limits distance. At higher speeds, air drag increases dramatically and quickly cancels out gains from extra velocity.
If a ball leaves the bat at roughly 125 mph, with a near-optimal launch angle of 30 to 35 degrees, modest backspin to generate lift, warm air, and a light tailwind, projectile modeling shows a maximum carry distance just under 600 feet at sea level.
So, the home run hit by Joey Meyer is about as far as a home run can be hit.
The Smarter Every Day YouTube channel created a batting machine that could swing an aluminum bat far faster than any human could. Their best hit ball, using a machine, was 696 feet.
One of the biggest changes in baseball over the years has been the shift toward targeting home runs as a primary strategy.
In the dead-ball era in the early 20th century, the game was about batting averages, stealing bases, and trying to earn each run on the basepaths.
Advanced statistics demonstrated that a solo home run is far more valuable than a sequence of singles that requires multiple successful events and risks ending the inning early. One swing that guarantees a run, regardless of the number of runners on base or defensive alignment, dramatically increases scoring efficiency.
Analytics also revealed that slugging percentage and on-base percentage correlate more strongly with run production and wins than batting average or stolen bases.A walk plus a home run produces two runs without putting the ball in play, eliminating defensive variance. As teams modeled thousands of innings, it became clear that power-heavy lineups create more runs over a season even if they strike out more often.
Eliminating defensive plays makes outcomes more predictable, leading to what is known as the three true outcomes. The three true outcomes in baseball are strikeouts, walks, and home runs. None of these involves defensive plays.
Prior to 1920, most years averaged about 0.1 home runs hit per game. In the last several years, it has been common to see 1.2 home runs per game. A 12-fold increase over the course of about 120 years.
I’ll end with what is perhaps the biggest record in baseball: career home runs.
The current Major League Baseball record is held by Barry Bonds with 762 home runs. He surpassed the record held by Hank Aaron, who passed Babe Ruth.
However, Major League Baseball is not the only league.Sadaharu Oh hit 868 official home runs in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League between 1959 and 1980. His total is fully documented, consistently scored, and universally recognized, making it the highest verified career home run total in baseball history.
In the Negro Leagues, Josh Gibson is often cited as having hit 800 or more home runs, but this figure includes exhibitions, barnstorming games, and incomplete records.
While Gibson’s power was legendary and very likely comparable to or greater than MLB sluggers of his era, his total cannot be precisely verified, so it remains an estimate rather than an official count.However, just to bring things full circle, I would go back to Bill Jenkinson once more. In his book, he estimated that if Babe Ruth had played with modern rules, a modern schedule, and in ballparks with modern dimensions, he probably would have hit over 1,000 home runs in his career.
Almost 300 more than the 714 career home runs he actually hit.
So, will we see even more home runs in the future?Maybe, but probably not, and if so, not a significant amount.
As with every revolution in warfare, advances in offense lead to advances in defense. More home run hitters have resulted in harder-throwing pitchers who get rotated in more often.
What began as an accident of ballpark geometry is now a deliberately engineered outcome, shaped by decades of rulemaking and the adaptation of advanced statistics. The history of the home run is, in many ways, the history of baseball’s shifting balance between strategy and spectacle.This episode can be found at: https://everything-everywhere.com/all-about-home-runs/