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One of the most dramatic events in all of sports is the home run. In a single instant, leads can change hands and games can be won or lost. Yet the home run hasn't always been what it is today. The rules surrounding home runs have changed, and in some cases dramatically. Perhaps the biggest change has been in the strategy surrounding home runs. Advanced statistical analysis has changed the approach to home runs so much that the game almost wouldn't be recognizable to someone from the late 19th century. Learn more about home runs, how they've changed, and how they've influenced the game of baseball on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Everybody knows someone who insists on doing things the hard way. There's a friend who keeps paying for a subscription they forgot they had, or the one refusing to update their phone just because it still works. Mint Mobile exists purely to fix that problem. You get the same coverage, same speed, just without the inflated price tag. That's why I recommend Mint Mobile. For a limited time, get 50% off 3, 6 or 12 month plans of unlimited Premium Wireless. Ready to stop paying more than you have to? New customers can make the switch today and for a limited time, get Unlimited Premium wireless for just $15 a switch. Now@mintmobile.comeed that's mintmobile.comeed upfront payment of $45 for three month, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required $15 a month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only over 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. Additional terms apply. See mintmobile.com this episode is sponsored by Quints. For months I have been telling you about the high quality products at great prices at Quint's, but I want to share with you a recent experience I had with them. I recently purchased a new laptop bag from Quince. I ordered it online and waited for it to arrive, but it never showed up. It turns out the Postal Service lost it, not Quince's fault, but I went to their website to report it. I was able to contact a live customer service agent via chat. They confirmed the issue and had a new bag sent to me immediately. The entire process took about a minute. No hoops to jump through and no waiting. Quints works directly with top factories and cuts out the middleman. So you're not paying for brand markup, just quality clothing. And they also happen to have amazing customer service. Refresh your wardrobe with quints. Go to quints.com daily for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's quincee.com daily free shipping and 365 day returns quints.com daily. The origin of this episode dates back to the first list of 100 ideas I had when I launched the podcast back in 2020. One of the ideas came from a book by a baseball researcher named Bill Jenkinson titled the Year Babe Ruth hit 104 home runs. That idea has been sitting at the very top of my list for years, and every time I open up that file, the idea has been staring me in the face. In the book, Jenkins detailed Babe Ruth's 1921 season, unquestionably one of the greatest seasons in baseball history. He went through every game he played in the entire season, read the write ups from every sports writer, and included all the exhibition games against other major league teams. His argument was that if Babe Ruth were playing a modern schedule in modern ballparks with modern rules, he would have hit 104 home runs in 1921. It was a really interesting read, but for years I struggled to find a way to turn it into an interesting episode. I finally realized that what was interesting was the changes in rules, ballparks and strategies that had changed the game and and approach to home runs. And so with that, in the mid 19th century, when organized baseball was first codified, the home run scarcely existed as a strategic concept. Early rules didn't even guarantee that a ball hit over the fence would count as a run. In many cases, spectators were expected to retrieve balls hit into the crowd and the batter could continue running until the ball was returned. What later became known as the ground rule home run was originally just an extension of aggressive baserunning. Outfields at the time were vast and irregular, fences were often non existent, and balls were soft and inconsistently manufactured. Hits that would later be routine fly outs or home runs were instead rolling balls chased down by outfielders. Moreover, in the very early days, a batter was out if the ball was caught after one bounce, so hitting long fly balls was often discouraged. Scoring emphasized getting on base and speed rather than raw power. By the late 19th century, professional leagues such as the National League began to standardize fields and equipment, and the concept of a fair ball clearing the outfield boundary for an automatic run gradually took hold. Even then, home runs remained uncommon. The dead ball era, which lasted roughly until 1919, was defined by heavy, light, loosely wound baseballs that were used for entire games and became soft, misshapen, and darkened with dirt and tobacco juice. Pitchers Were permitted to scuff, spit on and otherwise manipulate the ball, making it difficult to hit with authority. Strategy centered on bunting, hit and run plays, stolen bases and manufacturing single runs. League leaders often finished seasons with fewer than 10 home runs. Many home runs of this period were inside the park, Home runs where the ball didn't clear the outfield wall. They were just glorified triples where the batter literally would run to home. The single season home run record was set in 1884 by Ed Williamson of the Chicago White stockings, who hit 27 home runs. That record stood for 35 years, and the record was finally broken in 1919 by a young pitcher right fielder for the Boston Red Sox, Babe ruth, who hit 29. 1920 saw a radical change in how home runs were perceived. Babe Ruth, now playing for the New York Yankees, demolished his previous single season home run record from the year before with 54. And this turned the game of baseball on its head. Ruth hit more home runs than every other team in the major leagues, save for the Philadelphia Phillies, who only hit 64 in 1921. Ruth hit 59 home runs in one of the greatest seasons ever. And at the age of 26, he became the career leader in home runs with 162 home runs at the end of the season. There were several rules surrounding home runs in 1921 that are different from those today. The first is that if the ball went over the outfield wall in fair territory, but then curved into foul territory, it was considered a foul ball and not a home run. Second, if a home run ended a game, it was not necessarily recorded as a home run. Only enough bases necessary to drive in the winning run were awarded. And finally, if a ball bounced over the wall, it was considered a home run, unlike today, where it's a ground rule double. The other major differences from today and 1921 were the ballpark dimensions. Many parks built around 1900 had enormous outfields. By modern standards, the center field wall could be as far as 460 to almost 500ft from home plate. For example, League park in Cleveland originally had 460ft to dead center field, 385ft to the left field before its 1910 reconfiguration. Most famously, the New York Polo Grounds, which was home to both the Giants and the Yankees till 1923, had a notch in their center field wall. That 483ft, the furthest distance of any wall in baseball history. This was offset by the very close right and left field walls. The right field at the polo grounds was 256ft and the left field was 279ft. Only five players in baseball history ever hit a home run in dead center field in the Polo Grounds. Babe Ruth, Luke Easter, Hank Aaron, Lou Brock and Joe Adcock. The dimensions in early ballparks weren't gimmicks. Early ballparks were literally squeezed into city blocks, rail yards and odd parcels of land. Before standardized rules, teams accepted radical asymmetry as just being a part of the game. Only in the mid 20th century did major League Baseball begin enforcing minimum distances, gradually eliminating the most extreme cases. One debate that has always surrounded home runs is who's hit the longest home run in history? Today, major league ballparks use the statcast system, which uses radar to measure a ball's velocity and trajectory to estimate its distance. For decades, however, we only had anecdotal stories of massive home runs and this led to absurd measurements, often based on where a ball came to a rest after rolling. What modern measurements show is that 500 foot home runs are very, very rare. For example, in 2025 there were 0500 foot home runs in Major League Baseball. The longest was 495ft by Nick Kurtz of the formerly Oakland Certa, Sacramento and soon to be Las Vegas A's. Prior to the Statcast era, the best documented moonshot home run was probably hit by Mickey Mantle. He hit a home run estimated at 565ft that cleared the left field bleachers at Griffith stadium in Washington D.C. and far outside the stadium. The home run was also aided by a favorable wind. Griffith Stadium's deep dimensions made the estimate plausible and multiple witnesses corroborated the distance. Some initial estimates place the distance at 634ft, but those have been debunked. Reggie Jackson hit a towering home run off the light tower at Detroit's Tiger stadium in the 1971 All Star Game. It was estimated at 520 to 530ft. This is one of the most visually convincing long home runs ever captured on broadcast video, lending credibility to the estimate. Likewise, Babe ruth probably hit more 500 home runs than anyone in history. One of his longest and the one recognized by the Guinness Book of World's Records was hit on July 18, 1921 in Detroit, and it was estimated to have gone 575ft. The longest verified home run ever ever hit in any competitive play was hit on June 2, 1987 by Joey Meyer of the AAA Denver Zephyrs playing in Mile High Stadium in Denver. His home run was measured at 582ft. Given the high altitude in Denver, there's less air resistance, which makes it the ideal place to hit record home runs. Under ideal but still physically plausible conditions, physicists and baseball researchers have converged on a maximum range of about 550 to 600ft, which is in line with the longest home runs ever hit. A hitter swinging at the extreme upper limit of human capability can produce a bat speed around 80-85 mph, yielding a maximum exit velocity of the ball of near 120-125 mph. Muscle force, reaction time, and injury risk impose hard biological limits. The ball itself also limits distance. At higher speeds, air drag increases dramatically and quickly cancels out the gains from extra velocity. So if a ball leaves the bat at roughly 125 miles per hour with a near optimal launch angle of 30 to 35 degrees, modest backspin to generate lift, warm air, and a light tailwind projectile modeling shows a maximum carry distance of just under 600ft at sea level. So the home run hit by Joey Meyer is about as far as a home run can be hit. The Smarter Everyday YouTube channel created a batting machine that could swing an aluminum bat faster than any human could. Their best hit ball using a machine was 696ft. One of the biggest changes in baseball over the years has been the shift towards targeting home runs as a primary strategy. In the dead ball era in the early 20th century, the game was all about batting averages, stealing bases, and trying to earn each run on the base path. Advanced statistics demonstrated that a solo home run is far more valuable than a sequence of singles that requires multiple successful events and risks ending the inning early. One swing that guarantees a run regardless of the number of runners on base or defensive alignment dramatically increases scoring efficiency. Analytics also revealed that slugging percentage and on base percentage correlate more strongly with run production and wins than batting average or stolen bases. A walk plus a home run produces two runs without putting the ball in play, eliminating any defensive variance. As teams modeled thousands of innings, it became clear that power heavy lineups create more runs over a season, even if they strike out more often. Completely eliminating defensive plays makes outcomes more predictable, leading to what's known as the three true outcomes. The three true outcomes in baseball are strikeouts, walks, and home runs. None of these involves defensive plays. Prior to 1920, most years averaged about 0.1 home runs hit per game. In the last several years, it's been common to see 1.2 home runs per game, a 12 fold increase over the course of about 120 years. I'll end with what is perhaps the biggest record in baseball career home runs. The current major league record is held by Barry Bonds with 762 home runs. He surpassed the record held by Hank Aaron, who passed Babe Ruth. However, Major League Baseball is not the only league. Sadaharu oh hit 868 home runs in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball League between 1959 and 1980. His total is fully documented, consistently scored, and universally recognized, making it the highest verified career home run total in baseball history. However, in the Negro Leagues, Josh Gibson is often cited as Having hit over 800 or more home runs, but this figure includes exhibition games, barnstorming games and incomplete records. While Gibson's power was legendary and very likely comparable to or greater than the major league sluggers of his era, his total can't be verified precisely, so it remains an estimate rather than an official count. However, just to bring things full circle, I would like to go back to Bill Jenkinson once more. In his book, he estimated that if Babe Ruth had played with modern rules, a modern schedule, and in ballparks with modern dimensions, he probably would have hit over 1,000 home runs in his career, almost 300 more than the 714 career home runs he actually hit. So will we see even more home runs in the future? Maybe, but probably not, and if so, not a significant amount. As with every revolution in warfare, advances in offense lead to advances in defense. More home run hitters has resulted in harder throwing pitchers who get rotated in more often. What began as an accident of ballpark geometry is now a deliberately engineered outcome shaped by decades of rulemaking and the adaptation of advanced statistics. The history of the home run is in many ways the history of baseball's shifting balance between strategy and spectacle. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show Notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read on the show.