On Saturday night, the 2019 Minnesota Twins established the record for the most home runs hit by a team in big league history. On Aug. 31.
The Twins mashed six more long balls in Detroit on Saturday, pushing their total to 268 and breaking the existing record set by last year's New York Yankees.
The team version of the home run record generates headlines, but excitement about it pales in comparison to the explosion of coverage we see anytime a player pursues the individual single-season record. This is understandable -- a drama with a clear-cut protagonist is more resonant than one with a mostly indistinguishable ensemble, even an impressive one.
This season, the Twins have been a go-to feel-good story in the baseball media as they've risen from mediocrity to a nearly season-long first-place standing in the American League Central. The home run storyline makes for a nice thread in these stories. But one thing you find lacking from these features: suggestions that the Twins are the best home run-hitting team of all time.
We instinctively understand the difference between a record and an absolute statement of historical quality. The difference is context, and the Twins' pursuit of the record is typically viewed as an outgrowth from a larger tale -- the one about 2019's virulent home run epidemic. There is no greater evidence of the paradox than this: Though Minnesota broke the home run record with nearly a month to go in the season, it is only 14 homers ahead of this year's Yankees, who in August already have broken the record for home runs hit by a team in a month. At the All-Star break, the Twins had hit 17 more homers than New York, so their advantage has dwindled slightly.
The sheer number of home run records that will be shattered this season is staggering, so why not a new all-time team leader? The Twins (or the Yankees) might set a record, but that doesn't make them the all-time best at anything. Right?
Well, that depends on your perspective. Certainly when you compare Minnesota's homer total to league averages, it pushes the Twins down the all-time leaderboard. They have hit home runs at a rate 40% better than this year's bloated big league average, but that ranks only 83rd all time. The top of the chart is dominated by teams in low-homer environments. The all-time champ in that department is the 1927 Yankees at 135% above league average. That's ridiculous, but it tells you as much about the way baseball was played at the time as it does about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig & Co. They were great -- perhaps the best ever -- but they were also a team out of time.
Over the winter, when Yankees reliever Adam Ottavino spouted off about how Ruth would strike out every time against him, I was adamant that the statement was absurd, and I still believe that. If you transported 1927 Babe Ruth, exactly as he was at the time, into 2019, then, yes, the Big Fella might have some problems making the adjustment. But like most things, baseball is an iterative process. Players build off the gains made by those who came before them.
If Ruth were born in 1992 instead of 1895, he would have had the same advantages that today's players have enjoyed from advances of knowledge in the entire range of disciplines that benefit today's athletes. All we can do is judge players in the context of the time in which they played, and Babe Ruth was in a very real sense off the charts when he rose to transcendent prominence in the 1920s.
The same thinking has to be applied at the team level, but I don't think that means that the 2019 Twins are necessarily "only" the 83rd-best homer-hitting team ever. It's just where they stand by one measure, one that makes the 1927 Yankees appear to be as awe-inspiring as they actually were to their contemporaries. There are ways to look at this that better capture how special the Twins' performance has been this season than homers vs. league average, although none of them are likely to anoint Minnesota as the best homer-hitting team of all time, at least once any kind of contextual filter is applied to the numbers.
Here are a few rankings for the Twins by some different measures (numbers as of Aug. 29):
• Homers per game. Teams play more games than they used to, but we're six decades into the 162-game era. It's obvious that the Twins would break this mark as well as the raw homer total. But looking at the numbers expressed like this gives an idea of the scale of the Twins' achievement. Last year's Yankees averaged 1.65 homers per game, setting the record. This year's Twins, as mentioned, average 1.96.
• Homers per at-bat. Kind of the same thing, but also impressive to consider. Last year's Yankees established the record by homering in 4.84% of their at-bats. This year's Twins have homered in 5.53% of theirs. The difference is huge but, then again, this year's Yankees, Dodgers and Astros are also on track to top the existing record in this measure.
• 20-homer hitters. The Twins already have seven players who have hit at least 20 home runs and one more -- Jorge Polanco -- who has 19. Utility player Marwin Gonzalez, who is dealing with an abdominal injury, has 15. So it's possible the Twins could have nine players finish with at least 20 homers -- an entire lineup. According to Baseball Reference, the current total of seven matches the record set by seven teams, most recently last year's Dodgers. Whether or not Gonzalez reaches 20, Polanco's next dinger will make the Twins baseball's first team with eight 20-homer hitters.
• 1 vs. 2. The 1927 Yankees hit 158 homers, a total that now seems quaint. Ruth hit 60 to lead the league and set a record that stood for 34 years, while Gehrig finished second at 47. Their 107 combined homers were nearly double the total of what any other team in the American League hit that season. The Philadelphia Athletics ranked second in the AL in homers with 56. And while Yankee Stadium was designed to maximize the abilities of Ruth, and fit Gehrig as well, New York's 75 road homers were more than any other AL team hit overall. Over in the National League, the Mel Ott-led Giants led the way with 109 homers, so if you look at the majors as a whole, the Yankees' edge over the second-best homer-hitting team in 1927 was 44.9%.
That is not the biggest 1 vs. 2 edge in baseball history. The 1920 and 1921 Yankees -- when Ruth changed the game upon the end of the dead ball era -- both topped that mark, with the 1920 team hitting a record 79.7% more homers than the second-best homer-hitting team in the majors. The dynamic was so new at that point that it hardly seems fair to call this the record. Perhaps more impressive was mark of the 1936 Yankees, featuring rookie Joe DiMaggio, who hit 48% more homers than any other team.
As for the 2019 Twins: Given their relatively thin margin over the Yankees, they don't stand out at all by this measure. Minnesota has hit 4.4% more homers than New York, an edge that could disappear in a matter of a few games.
• Isolated power-plus. Fangraphs publishes a suite of "plus" statistics that are adjusted for league and ballpark contexts. They don't do homers-plus, but the numbers include isolated power-plus, which is a pretty good proxy. (Isolated power in its raw form is simply slugging percentage minus batting average.) In terms of raw ISO, the Twins (.230) are on pace to shatter the all-time record, which entering the season was the .206 mark established by the 2010 Toronto Blue Jays. But, again, context creeps in.
The top four teams in this measure are from 2019 (Twins, Yankees, Astros, Dodgers), this year's Red Sox are sixth, barely behind those 2010 Jays, and this season's Cubs, Mariners and Athletics also rank among the all-time top 15. It's just that kind of year. When you move to ISO+, all of this year's teams disappear from the upper ranks of the leaderboard, which is topped by those 1927 Yankees (ISO+ of 153). The Twins rank 51st at 123.
You can see the pattern here. When we are in the area of raw homer totals, or homers per game or per at-bat, the Twins and all of this year's top power teams stand out historically. But when you filter them through league-based adjustments, they move from all-time great to all-time good. But let me leave you with one other approach: the progression of the all-time record. Let's do this chart-style:
I've taken the progression back to the dawn of baseball's modern era, which began with the first season of the American League in 1901. The Jesse Burkett-led Cardinals set the initial home run record with fewer dingers than Pete Alonso has right now. But that record was broken the very next season by the proto-Twins -- the 1902 Washington Senators, led by Hall of Famer Ed Delahanty's 10 blasts. The record has been going up gradually ever since, with the 1961 Yankees holding the mark the longest (35 years). As you can see, a team's home ballpark (Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field, Baker Bowl and the Polo Grounds) often has played a role is this category.
But check out the last two numbers in the chart. Through Wednesday, the Twins were on pace to club a surreal 318 homers this season, upping the existing mark by 19%. It would be the largest uptick in this record since the 1947 New York Giants became the first team to pass the 200-homer barrier. It would be the second-largest increase since the 1920 Yankees ushered in the live ball era.
No matter how you filter it, what the Twins have done this season is awfully impressive. That they've hit all those homers in service of a run at a division title is both validating and unsurprising -- the teams listed in that home run record progression chart have combined to win an average of 96.5 games per 162 during their historic campaigns. Sure, the Twins have spread the wealth, but it's not like they are composed of a bunch of nobodies -- designated hitter Nelson Cruz ranks fourth in career homers among active players and has hit more long balls than any other player this decade.
Whether or not you consider the Twins the best-ever homer team -- assuming they hold off the Yankees -- really depends on how you view the issue. A Minnesota fan might look at it like this, and it's a worthy argument: The 2019 Twins have hit the most homers in the most prolific home run season of all time. (So far.) Teams have never been better at going deep and the 2019 Twins have been better than anyone at doing it.
Extra innings
1. I was watching the Yankees play the Mariners early in the week and had a flashback. (A memory born of nostalgia, not a residual from a prior chemical indulgence.) It took me back to Oct. 3, 1995, which was the first day on which we saw the expanded playoff format in action. The change from four to eight teams should have happened the year before, but, well, you know how that turned out.
In what now seems like startlingly bad judgment, it was decided that to improve television ratings for the playoffs, the thing to do was to regionalize the broadcasts, as had long been the arrangement in the NFL (although not for the playoffs). So that night, all four division series games started at the same time, and the game you got in your market was the game you got. You did at least get frequent cut-ins and updates from the other games. It was a bit frantic to track what was happening in all the games, especially since this was pre-smartphone and I was watching at Hi-Tops, a sports bar that used to be adjacent to Wrigley Field.
That first night, honestly, it was kind of exhilarating. Don't get me wrong -- the weird setup was ill-conceived and hopefully we will never see the likes of it again. But with four high-stakes games unfolding simultaneously, there was always something happening, somewhere.
In New York, the Yankees were playing in their first playoff game since 1981, and the first of Don Mattingly's great career. They were hosting Ken Griffey Jr. and the Mariners in Seattle's first-ever postseason appearance. It was a good game -- the Yankees won 9-6 despite two Griffey homers off David Cone -- and it turned out to be an unforgettable series that the Mariners took in five games.
The Yankees and Mariners have since met twice more in the playoffs, but whenever I see them meet in the regular season, I always think back to that first time. And it occurred to me that there is something about Seattle meeting the Yankees that felt like a kind of historical benchmark in Mariners franchise history. As in, you're not entirely all the way there historically if you haven't played the Yankees in the playoffs.
There is a reason why this strange notion occurs to me: The Yankees really have played just about every franchise in the postseason at some point. Twenty-four teams have had their own Yankee-related memories at the most dramatic time of the year.
It's easier to list the exceptions:
• Yankees: Well, duh. But there are certain portions of baseball history where if you divided the Yankees organization into two big league teams and put one in the National League, the Bombers might have played their "B" team in the World Series.
• White Sox: These two AL stalwarts couldn't have played in the postseason before 1969, the dawn of divisional play. But it hasn't happened since then, either. And it won't in 2019.
• Nationals: Living in the baseball past as I tend to do -- especially the parts of it that happened long before I was born -- it still galls me that in 2005, the Montreal/Washington franchise wasn't installed in the AL East and called the Senators. Anyway, the Nats haven't made the World Series, nor did the Expos, so the franchise has not had a shot at the Yankees in October. It's possible that could change this season, but it's also possible it might have occurred in 1994 -- the postseason that never happened.
• Rockies: Another NL team, this one with a single World Series appearance, which came against New York rival Boston in 2007. Unless the Rox go on an unprecedented run over the next few weeks, we'll have to wait at least another year for a Colorado-New York World Series.
• Rays: Tampa Bay and New York have both made the same postseason bracket twice. It happened in back-to-back seasons (2010 and 2011), but neither time did they face each other. The pairing nearly came together in 2010. The Yankees swept the Twins to advance to the AL Championship Series, while the Rays forced a decisive Game 5 against the Texas Rangers. Tampa Bay had home-field advantage and ace David Price on the mound. But Rangers lefty Cliff Lee went the distance, and Texas moved on to face the Yankees. Take heart, though, because it would be less than shocking if the Rays and Yankees meet in this year's playoffs.
• Blue Jays: New York has faced AL East rivals Boston (four times) and Baltimore (twice) in the playoffs, but never the Rays or Blue Jays. Toronto and New York have never both made the same postseason bracket.
2. This week's news that the Kansas City Royals might be in the process of being sold struck me both as surprising and heartening. It was surprising because I simply had not caught wind of any such discussion and kind of figured that the plan was for the club to pass to David Glass' children, all of whom are on the team's board of directors. That includes his son, Dan, who serves as team president. That could still happen, of course -- this is far from a done deal.
At the same time, I found it heartening both as a longtime follower of the Royals and as a baseball fan. From the Royals' standpoint, that John Sherman, a local businessman with ties to the region and the club going back to the 1970s, might be willing to steward the team into its next era is exciting just in terms of long-term stability. The Royals' lease at Kauffman Stadium lasts through 2031, so it's not like the team was going anywhere anytime soon. But it will be great to see if Sherman, a part-owner of the well-run Cleveland Indians, can move the needle.
More than all of that, however, I was heartened because of the reported sale price of around $1 billion. Why? Because for all the caterwauling we've been hearing the past couple of years about the state of baseball, its relevance in our culture and its prospects for the future, dudes are willing to plunk down $1 billion for a team in Kansas City.
That tells me for all its challenges, baseball, as an industry, remains as strong as it has ever been.
3. They say records are made to be broken, but the Astros are on pace to set a record that can't be broken -- only tied. Through Wednesday's games, Houston manager AJ Hinch still had not called for a single intentional walk this season.
We know the reasons behind this -- analytics tells us intentional walks are generally boneheaded moves. And while many longtime fans decry the effect that analysis has had on the on-field product, can we at least agree the disappearance of the intentional walk is a good thing? Probably not.
According to baseball-reference.com, teams have issued 0.16 intentional walks per game this season. That would break the record of 0.19, set in 2016 and tied last season. Intentional passes have been tracked only since 1955, but since that time, the number peaked at 0.40 in 1967.
(Ironically, I wrote this item during the Twins-White Sox game on Wednesday, and as I typed it up, Chicago manager Rick Renteria ordered two intentional walks to Minnesota slugger Nelson Cruz. The second one came with two outs and runners on first and second. It worked, as Eddie Rosario grounded out to end the inning. Cruz entered the night with a 3.143 OPS against White Sox starter Ross Detwiler, going 5-for-7 with two doubles and three homers. So you can understand Renteria's thinking.)
Hinch, and the Astros, ordered just four intentional walks last season, three fewer than any other team since 1955. Obviously, the all-time "leaderboard" in this category is dominated by recent teams. But there is one weird exception: Under Walter Alston, the 1974 Dodgers issued just nine free passes all season. The second-fewest that year was Minnesota (under Frank Quilici) with 18. The most was 116 by John McNamara's Padres. That's an enormous total by today's standards and the most of any club since 1955 -- three more than the 1980 Padres, who were managed by longtime broadcaster Jerry Coleman in his only season as a big league skipper.
Still, Alston's figure stands out for the era and because he had ordered up at least 33 walks in every season during a managerial career that began in 1954. His last two seasons -- 1975 and 1976 -- featured 20 and 29 intentional walks, respectively.
As for this season, the Astros are positioned to become the first team with zero intentional free passes. It's entirely up to Hinch. However, in a recent visit to Chicago, after his pregame chat one evening, Hinch said good-naturedly that he planned to order up an intentional walk during Houston's last game this season -- just to keep the goose egg out of the record book, I guess.
Was he joking? Frankly, it was hard to tell. Guess we'll find out on Sept. 29.