Ladies and gentlemen, the experts are telling us that global warming is leading to more home runs in baseball, so I want you to do me a favor: I want you to go ahead and crank up your AC, take your gas-guzzling SUV on a joy ride, and start consuming as much beef as you can possibly get your hands on.
Cuz there's never been a more exciting time to increase your carbon footprint.
That study is out of Dartmouth University.
And it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
As the air gets warmer, the air gets less dense.
Dartmouth College researchers said they can connect at least 500 additional home runs from 2010 to 2019 to Earth's human-made warming.
The research was based on their simple premise that "air density is inversely proportional to temperature," according to the paper, and that with all "else being equal, warmer air is less dense and a batted ball will carry farther."
"In some ways this wasn't all that surprising," said Dartmouth doctoral student Christopher Callahan, who authored the paper with Nathaniel Dominy, a professor of anthropology; Jeremy DeSilva, the chair of the anthropology department; and Justin Mankin, an assistant professor who studies climate variability and the risks posed by global warming. "It was relatively straightforward. In some ways it was confirming that basic physical understanding that we already had."
And if you believe all the stuff you see on TV, the number of deep balls is going to increase dramatically over the next five years until we're all dead because of the fungus in "The Last of Us."
From 1998, the first season of the 30-team MLB, through last year — and not including Covid-shortened 2020 — the number of home runs has varied annually from 4,186 in 2014 to 6,776 in 2019.
If current climate trends continue, researchers said, there will be 192 additional long balls per year by 2050 and 467 more per season by 2100, researchers said...
From the start of pro baseball in the late 19th century through 1993, there was only one season when the average team hit more than 1 home run per game.
But starting in 1994, the average has topped 1 in all but four seasons. The top four homer seasons have all been recorded since 2017 — 1.39 in 2019, 1.28 in 2020, 1.26 in 2017 and 1.22 in 2021.
And to that I say bring on the global warming.
Cuz there's nothing more I'd like to see in baseball than more home runs.
We need to see people ripping down their solar panels, ditching their recycling bins, taking longer, hotter showers, and cutting down as many trees as possible.
If we're going to make baseball great again, it starts with destroying the planet!
And the time is now.
Also, let's get more steroids in the game while we're at it, shall we?
