Baseball

Home runs are exhilarating – those lofting moments when everyone looks skyward, baseball players and fans alike, anxiously awaiting the outcome: run or out, win or loss, elation or despair. Over the past several Major League Baseball seasons, home run numbers have climbed dramatically, including Aaron Judge’s record-breaking 62 homers for the New York Yankees in 2022. Baseball analysts have pointed to many different factors for this surge, from changes in baseball construction to advances in game analytics. Our study, published April 7, 2023, offers solid evidence for another cause – rising global temperatures. What we learned from 100,000 baseball games The physics tell a simple and compelling story: Warm air is less dense than cool air. As air heats up and molecules move faster, the air expands, leaving more space between molecules. As a result, a batted ball should fly farther on a warmer day than it would on a cooler day owing to less air resistance. Th...