Too many Baseball Home Runs 1924
BASEBALL SHUDDERS AT THE HOME-RUN MENACE
THERE were too many home-runs last summer—so many, in fact, that the popularity of baseball is said to be facing something like a crisis. As a result, the best minds and magnates of the Major Leagues will spend much of this winter, reports a sports writer, Irving E. Sanborn, devising ways and means for “the rescue of the home-run from the ranks of the commonplace, and its restoration to its distinguished position in the esteem of baseball fans.” The average fan, says Mr. Sanborn, may be more forcibly imprest with the necessity for breaking the New York monopoly of major pennants and World’s Series, or the resumption of the privilege of drafting recruits from the high-grade minor leagues. These reforms may be important enough, admits Mr. Sanborn, but they are not so important as “to stop the cheapening of the home-run, which has been in progress for several seasons.” The average fan. he predicts, is going to lose one of his main reasons for being interested in baseball unless this is done, and when the average fan does that, as everybody knows, it is time for the best minds and magnates to get busy. Mr. Sanborn reports, in Baseball (New York):
There was a total of 976 home-runs registered in the American and National Leagues in 1923, as against 1,054 in the two major circuits in 1922. National League batsmen contributed 536 toward the 1923 total, and American League sluggers made 442. These figures are taken from the unofficial averages, but their only difference from the official will be due to possible clerical errors, because there is seldom any argument about a home-run. The umpire decides 99 1/2 per cent. of them—not the official scorer.
That slight decrease in four-base hits will not restore the feature to its former exalted position for a good many years yet unless some method is found by the rule-making members of the magnate oligarchy to bring about quality instead of quantity production in the home-run department. The Philadelphia Nationals, as usual, led the majors in four-baggers this year. The total number of drives which floated out or bounded out of the cigar-box in which the Phillies play their home games was 110. Ten or fifteen years ago that would have been a respectable total for the whole eight teams in either big league.
During the past season 18 home-runs were made in one minor league ball park in one afternoon when a double header was played. That happened in the bushes, of course, and probably the fences were shorter than in the bigger circuits. But it makes a joke out of what ought to be one of the most inspiring features of baseball to have it happen eighteen times in one day even on a bush-league field. And the men who frame the rules for big-league games make laws which govern all contests wherever baseball is played. There is no more tempting appeal to an epicurean appetite than quail done to a turn and served hot. But history does not record the fact that any one has yet been able to inhale thirty quail in thirty days without nausea.
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