A Pinch Hit from James Strapp, who has done a couple of these for us before:
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I took my boys to the Jays game last
Friday. In that game the Jays’ first hit was a Bautista home run in
the fourth inning. After eight innings, they had a total of four
hits, with two of them being home runs. No starter has a batting
average over .286. All they seem to be able to hit is home runs.
Well, that got me thinking. What team has had the highest percentage of their hits be home runs? And where do the 2010 Blue Jays stand?
The results show that the Jays are both potential record breakers and dramatic (and frustrating) anomalies. As of August 31, 201 of the Jays’ 1,127 hits this year have been home runs. That’s a HR% of 17.8%.
Turns out, if the Jays keep this pace up in September, they will set a record.
Using the Lahman Baseball Database, I calculated similar home run percentages for all teams across the years. The results are charted above. The next closest team to the Jays is the 2005 Texas Rangers, who homered in 17.0% of their hits. The Rangers’ 260 homers came within four home runs of matching the all-time record for team homers in a season, set by the Seattle Mariners in 1997.
The Jays are probably not going to come close to that total number. They are on pace for about 246 team home runs. That would put them somewhere between 4th and 12th all time (there are a few teams with between 242 and 249 home runs). But by getting fewer hits inside the park, they may set the all-time HR% record.
Here’re the ten teams with the highest percentage of their hits being home runs in a season, including the Jays' numbers to date.
So is hitting a high percentage of home runs good? It is for most teams. While the correlation between runs scored and HR% does not appear as high as runs and total home runs, as the diagram below shows, there is a general correlation.
What’s striking is how much of an anomaly the 2010 Jays are. They’re way off by themselves with the highest HR%, but only managing 4.7 runs per game this season. No other team stands out like this on the bottom of the diagram. If fact, the 2010 Jays have the lowest ratio of runs scored per game to home runs ever, dramatically so. Frustrating isn’t it.
The Blue Jays’ run for the All-Time Season HR% record—something to watch and ponder for the rest of the year.
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Thanks, James!
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20100902234040638