Idiots Write About Sports

Had to run to the bank this morning to get my finances in order. Made the mistake of turning on the local ESPN affiliate where Dan Patrick was holding court. The topic d’jour: steroids in baseball (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….), specifically a New York Times article noting a drop in home-run totals this year.

And in 2005, the number of home runs is down significantly from last season. It is a trend that began early this season, then subsided, with more home runs actually being hit this June than in June 2004. But the gap has opened again as the 162-game campaign moves toward the three-quarter mark. Through Monday, 3,674 home runs were hit in 1,767 games during the first four and a half months of the season, which translates to 2.08 home runs a game. That is down from 2.23 in 2004, when 3,942 home runs were hit through the same number of games. Over all, that is a decrease of 6.7 percent.

If the 2005 pace continues through the end of the season, the decrease will be nearly 8 percent from last year’s final figure of 2.25 homers a game.

Which doesn’t seem that much of a drop-off to me, given that numbers trend up and trend down all the time. It might be more telling to see if that kind of year-to-year downward trend has ever cropped up throughout the past century of baseball statistics, but who am to stand in the way of the Paper of Record and its hand-wringing? Besides, we’re getting off point here.

On his show, Dan Patrick correctly notes one reason for the drop-off: Barry Bonds, Jim Thome and a couple other big boppers whose names escape my Swiss-cheese brain at the moment have missed significant portions of the season. Surely, a full-season from a healthy Bonds might bump the home-runs totals up ever so slightly.

Of course, Patrick then negated this astute observation with this dopey one, which I’ll paraphrase here: “Then again, there’s guys like Derrek Lee and Morgan Ensberg who are having career years that offset the absences of Bonds and Thome.”

Where to begin in correcting this idiocy…

If Bonds and Thome and Frank Thomas and whoever else you want to name were playing more this season, it’s not as if the Derrek Lees and Morgan Ensbergs of the world would say to themselves, “OK, the pressure’s off me to hit home runs this year” and stop hitting dingers. Instead, however many home runs a healthy Bonds or Thome would hit — 10, 20, 30 — would be added on to the existing home run totals, causing that 8-percent figure the New York Times is bandying about to inch downward.

Or to put it another way: Dan, you well-coifed dolt. If it ain’t on a teleprompter, you’re out of your depth.

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