I was struck by the irony when I encountered Brian Dozier in the visitors' clubhouse in Baltimore on May 24. As he talked to teammates shortly before batting practice, the Twins leadoff hitter wore a T-shirt that read "All Me — PED Free," while an MLB official, checking in players who had been randomly selected for that day's routine drug tests, sat perhaps 10 feet away.
That tableau neatly sums up the state of baseball in 2017: Home runs have flooded the game today just as thoroughly as they did when Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds were smashing records — but nobody is pointing to steroids as the reason this time.
"I don't go up there trying to hit home runs," Dozier, who last season set an American League record for most home runs by a second baseman, said that day, "but sometimes your swing gets just right, and they go a long way."
They are going a long way more than ever right now. Major leaguers bashed 1,060 home runs in May, just missing the record for a calendar month, according to Elias Sports Bureau, the 1,069 that were hit in May 2000 during the height of what is commonly known as the steroids era. The Twins, who rank in the bottom third of homer-happy teams, hit 37, only the fourth time in the past 23 years they have hit so many in a single month.
Last season's MLB total of 5,610 homers is the second most ever; again, only in 2000 (5,693 homers) was the game so awash in slugging — and the sport is on pace to smash that record this year.
The Twins might not be leading that surge, but they are not immune from the trends, either. Friday's 11-5 victory over the Angels typified the way the game is being played today: The Twins hit three two-run homers to open a 6-0 lead. They entered Saturday with 241 runs this season, and 95 of them — 39.8 percent — scored after a homer. That virtually matches last year's 40.3 percent of the offense provided by homers, only the second time since the Killebrew era that Minnesota so depended on home runs.
Twins manager Paul Molitor sees a generation of hitters taught to swing for the fences, without regard to striking out, as a big factor in the new homer-happy playing style. "We tolerate strikeouts more, and a lot of guys don't know how to hit with two strikes to shorten their strokes and put the ball in play," Molitor said. "We've kind of created that [type of hitter] with the acceptance we've given strikeouts."
A recent Sports Illustrated article speculated that StatCast, MLB's new data-collection system that has pinpointed the optimum launch angle and exit velocity for home run hitters, as one factor in the power surge. Swinging harder and with a greater uppercut produces more homers, an all-or-nothing approach that does indeed come with a bigger dose of strikeouts as a side effect.
