OK. First off, I admit I have not yet read the articles mentioned by Tangotiger. That said, I think I have to add some complexity to this issue.
First, regarding "cold hard fact" #2 posed by HaverDad, like any other human analysis, there could and probably are many reasons the number of home runs increased from or in the 1990's and many of those are addressed by Tangotiger. But I think it is a fair assumption that at least a portion of the increase can be directly realted to steroids. Certainly pitchers on roids could throw harder but that might have been helpful to the home run increase and not a hinderance. But it is a fact that the post 1994 beefed up Barry Bonds on steriods hit a lot more home runs that the pre-beefed up Bonds did or, most likely in my mind, would have had he not beefed up.
The argument that the small time frame of the increase disproves that steriods had any impact is somewhat flawed at least as far as weather, balls, bats and strike zones which are not constants but are somewhat fluid and adjust over time and would be thought to ebb and flow for and against home runs throughout the period. I would tend to think continued albeit sporadic expansion is a provable cause factor over time because of the increase in home runs in 1961, the first expansion for a long time. An interesting statistical study might be to look at expansion years and the home run totals before and after each expansion As expansion increases the number of inefective starting and relief pitchers each batter gets to face increases. It is both logical and, hopefully, statistically provable. Perhaps Tangotiger can point us to where that might have already been accomplished.
I prefer to consider the implications in Basic Question #1. Asked another way, what would the impact of a by the book strike zone have on home run output. If we take HaverDad's charting of 3 games as a microcosm of the MLB universe [not statistacally valid but good enough for consideration] lets assume the maximum numbers for arguments sake. I do not know the total number of all pitches in those three games but if 29 miscalled pitches were 15% of those called it does not sound like a lot of pitches were thrown in those 3 games. 290 pitches in three games would be the maximum number if the 29 pitches were 10% of the total. Anyway, if we assume that 90% of the miscalls were called strikes that should have been balls, then 10% were called balls that should have been strkes. To keep it simple, let us allow an across the board cancelation. 3 stikes called balls cancel out 3 balls called strikes. We are now left with 23 miscalled pitches that were in favor of the pitcher and against the hitter in those 3 games. Certainly if even one of those miscalled strikes that were really balls was strike three the opportunity to hit a home run in that at bat is taken away by the non-book strike zone. If that particular hitter averages a home run every 30 at bats, then this particular occurrence may or may not result in one more home run, deending on how many times it happens to this particular hitter.
I see problems, however, for those strike miscalls that are occurring before the batter is called out on strikes. Certainly each additional strike affects each batteer's approach to the next pitch but it does not affect all batters the same way does it? And the batter's have adjusted to the new strike zone somewhat which means that they are both swinging at some pitches that are not strikes because they will be called strikes anyway [not the most likely pitches to hit home runs on] but at the same time might not be losing at bats over.
The bottom line is, I am not so convinced that changing the strike back to the way it used to be "would significantly increase oong ball output" [my emphasis addded]. Some, but how much, I believe would be hard to measure. Again, the individual human factor is so at play here.
TW344