April Baseball — Baseball Bench Coach

April baseball in the Midwest often means playing in cold weather. We have already seen some early season MLB games where chilly weather has played a role in low scoring affairs. You might know the old adage that pitchers are ahead of the hitters in April. Baseball analysts like to point to out that hitters take a longer time to get into their batting rhythm, do not particularly enjoy the sting of the bat in their hands, and often lament those long fly balls that die on the warning track. You might have also seen the news flash a week ago about a recently released study on how climate change has impacted baseball. Your Coach decided to be a baseball meteorologist for this blog post, and explore the hot and cold, as well as the myths and realities, of April baseball.

The Tampa Bay Rays have come out of the gate red hot! In their first eight games, the Rays won all eight by 4-plus runs, the best streak since the 1939 Yankees. The Rays didn’t stop there, winning their next five outings to go 13-0, which tied the all-time start of 13-0 by the 1982 Atlanta Braves. Toronto’s 6-3 win over the Rays this past Friday night broke the streak. By week’s end, Tampa’s record stood at 14-2, just four games ahead of the Blue Jays and Yankees in the tough AL Eastern Division.

Does a hot start mean a stand-out season and a championship awaits in October? Sometimes, but certainly not always. Of the ten hottest starts in MLB history, two were by American League teams that set regular season win records, first by New York in 1998 with 114, and then topped by Seattle three years later with 116. The ’98 Yanks won the World Series, but the ’01 Mariners fell short. My favorite two hot starts had one thing in common. Both the 1970 Reds (starting 22-6 with a 70-30 record at the All-Star Break) and the 1984 Tigers (starting with a blistering 35-5 record) were managed by Sparky Anderson. While Detroit captured the crown in 1984, a very hot Orioles team dominated the Reds in the 1970 Series.

There have been only five teams in MLB history that have gone “wire to wire”, meaning they were in first place for the entire season. The first such team was the 1927 Yankees, widely considered the best team ever with their “Murderer’s Row” lineup and a roster that included nine future Hall of Famers, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig among them. The previously mentioned ’84 Tigers is on this list as well, along with the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, 1990 Reds, and 2005 White Sox. The ’05 Sox, famous for small ball (the last of its kind), ran through the playoffs with an 11-1 mark, the best playoff record since baseball included a divisional championship round.

At the top of the national and sports news last week was the release of a study by a group of researchers led by Justin Mankin, a professor at Dartmouth, on the impact of climate change on baseball. The study, covering 60 MLB seasons (1960-2019), found that when the temperature of a game goes up by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the number of home runs in the game increases by 1.9%. To put it another way, for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, there could be 95 more home runs across a season. The study painfully notes that if humans had not emitted greenhouse gases, there would have been 500 fewer home runs over the past ten years.

There were though some naysayers who quickly discounted the study. In an April 7 New York Post article, Natalie O’Neill pointed out that despite all of the headlines, the actual impact of the climate change effect was small. Indeed, researchers in the past have noted other factors that come into play for an increase in home runs, including the size of the ball and its stitches. Chris Callahan, a baseball fanatic and one of the authors of the Dartmouth study, concedes that factors include the height of the baseball seams and advances in analytics. The bottom line is best expressed by Alan Nathan, a baseball physicist, who applauds the study since it supports the proposition that a baseball carries better in warm weather.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks of the Society for American Baseball Research has studied for over fifty years the impact of weather on baseball. He sees a trend of increasing cloud cover and greenhouse gases as opposing forces, resulting in more windy weather as we move forward. His view of baseball’s future includes all stadiums with enclosed roofs; player facilities no longer underground due to poor air quality, a return to the early days of the game; spring training sites being relocated to northern cities; long-stay scheduling where series would go from today’s 2-4 games to 5-7 games; and schedules favoring regional games, an abrupt turn from the 2023 balanced approach (featured in next week’s blog).

Is this all a bunch of hot air? FanGraphs, which maintains a very reliable database of MLB statistics, did a thorough study about ten years ago on whether pitchers or hitters have an “April advantage”. The study looked at every major pitching and hitting statistic in the months of April 2009-2013 compared to the same statistics over the course of those seasons. Interestingly, hitters actually came in above their respective full-season average in Aprils of three of those five seasons, a surprising result.

My favorite adage during April baseball when my favorite teams lose close games or key players to injury is simply that “it’s a long season”. Oh yes, it is. Let the games continue and the weather get a little warmer in the months ahead.

Until next Monday,

your Baseball Bench Coach