Whether you dig the long ball or have decided to merely remain friends with the round-tripper, it's undeniable that home runs are a large part of deciding who wins baseball games. The numbers 714, 755, 60, 61 and 762 are digits that any serious baseball fan recognizes. Some might profess to like a game with lots of singles and doubles, but how many instantly know what 3,215 or 792 mean (Pete Rose's and Tris Speaker's career singles and doubles records, respectively)?
Even when the home run has been relatively uncommon, as it was between 2010 and 2014, offense was still driven by the dinger. The 2014 home run rate was off more than 25 percent from the record rate of the early-2000s, but hits of all kinds also fell in 2014, resulting in a .251 league batting average that year, the lowest since 1972. But the lean 2010-2014 years didn't fundamentally alter the game; offense was still driven by the home run -- it's just that there were fewer of them. Whether or not 2018 will continue to be a homer-friendly environment remains to be seen. While home runs and offense are down in the very early going, teams still haven't done a full rotation through the, uh, rotation.
Power in itself won't get you a job or riches these days -- Mark Trumbo, Chris Carter and Mike Moustakas can attest to that -- but if you only have one trick up your sleeve, it's the best trick to have. And because home runs, like every stat, are easier to collect in environments that favor that stat, once again, home run records start to look vulnerable.
Giancarlo Stanton, of course, is the big dog, and the odds-on favorite to be the one challenging the record books this season, should any challenge arise. But in all, ZiPS projects 29 players to have at least a 50 percent shot at finishing the season with 30 or more home runs. When you run out all the probabilities for the league, ZiPS thinks 44 players on average will end up with at least 30 home runs, besting the total of 41 who hit that many in 2017.
In nearly half of the season simulations (45 percent), at least one hitter manages to hit 60 home runs in 2018, the first player to achieve that feat since Barry Bonds (73) and Sammy Sosa (64) did it in 2001. Stanton is the player to hit 60 in three-quarters of the simulations, but four other players -- Aaron Judge, Nolan Arenado, Cody Bellinger and Mike Trout -- all have at least a projected 1-in-100 chance of pulling it off.
With the resurgence in home runs, the number of active players projected to finish with at least 400 career home runs has ballooned back up to 13, with Stanton's quest to challenge 762 once again becoming plausible.
Let's shift gears a little. If we want to isolate just hitting home runs as a skill, what players are most reliant on the home run to contribute offensively? As with the league totals, I took the 2018 final projections and calculated a player's contribution both straight-up and without any plate appearances in which they hit a home run.
Some of the more one-dimensional guys, like Joey Gallo and Chris Davis, move up the list, but even for well-rounded players like Stanton, the home run is simply always going to be a large part of their game.
Like it or not, the home run is likely to stay a major part of the game without a real sea change in how the game is played. While humidors and the like might help keep power numbers down, teams are incentivized to base their offenses around power hitting, simply because that's where the smart money is.