BackHit the ball, a moment in the sun
Hitting several consecutive sixes in a cricket game - ok, even in cricket of the IPL variety - is a rare occurence.
PremiumConfession: I don’t follow the Indian Premier League (IPL) much. That’s because, like the great Michael Holding, I don’t think what they play in that league is really cricket.
Still, I have friends who do follow the tournament every year. One sent me a clip from a few weeks ago, when a gent named Rinku Singh went ballistic in the last over of a match. Needing 29 runs to win, Singh hit five consecutive sixes and closed out the game.
For a while, I couldn’t stop thinking about that clip. Because it was dramatic, because Singh showed nerves of steel and remarkable skill, because he pulled out a victory nobody had seen coming. But also for something else. Hitting several consecutive sixes in a cricket game—ok, even in cricket of the IPL variety—is a rare occurrence. Gary Sobers and Ravi Shastri pounded six sixes in a row in first-class games; Yuvraj Singh six in a T20 game; Kapil Dev four in a row in a Test. There might be others, I don’t know. But certainly no more than a handful.
In any case, that show by Rinku Singh finished a game that featured as many as 22 sixes. That’s 132 of the 411 runs the two teams scored. If that seems like a lot, it is. Or maybe it isn’t: this season has featured a game with 33 sixes, another with 30 ... That night’s 22 is only sixth (figures) on the list.
Or maybe it really is a lot. Despite these counts of 33, 30, 22 and the like, IPL games this season have featured an average of just 15 sixes. That’s 510 sixes in 34 games, as I write these words.
Hold on to that number—indeed, to that “just"—while I digress for a while.
In baseball, the parallel to a six is the home run. That happens when a batter belts the ball over the boundary wall—just like a six—and jogs around the bases, to much cheering and applause from teammates and the crowd. In the American professional game (Major League Baseball, or MLB), Barry Bonds, who played between 1986 and 2007, holds the records for most home runs in a career—762—and also for most home runs in a single season, 73 in 2001.
Like cricket, baseball throws up an endless series of statistics like these. For now, I’d like to focus on one, the number of home runs hit per game. That figure is interesting to baseball fans because, of course, a home run is an exciting part of the sport. It might also be interesting to cricket fans, because hitting a home run is a far rarer feat than hitting a six. No, the average baseball game features nowhere close to 15 homers.
But what’s interesting about this particular stat is the way it has changed. In 1980, American baseball pros were hitting about 1.5 home runs per game. That number rose steadily and touched about 2.25 by the beginning of this century. Then it declined over several years. But starting in 2015, it resumed the general upward trend, more sharply now, and reached 2.8 in 2019. (It’s declined a little since, again.)
1.5 to 2.8: that’s a near-doubling, in less than 40 years. What could be the reason? It might make for more exciting games, but it might also change other aspects of the sport. That could become a concern for fans. So naturally, and maybe especially because of the cornucopia of statistics that baseball is suffused in, there are scientists who seek a reason for the increase. One such team, mostly at Dartmouth University, has a recent paper out about their findings (‘Global warming, home runs, and the future of America’s pastime’, Christopher W. Callahan et al, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 7 April 2023, https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/aop/BAMS-D-22-0235.1/BAMS-D-22-0235.1.xml).
Their conclusion, as their title suggests, is that global warming is responsible.
To be sure, there are other reasons as well: “the construction of the baseball, performance-enhancing drugs, advanced technology, analytics and player training." Still, consider what these scientists found when they looked at temperature trends. For the same 40+ year period, they plotted the average high temperatures at stadiums on the days games were played. While obviously not an exact match to average home runs in a game, the similarity in the two graphs is striking. That is, the temperature when pro baseball is played, too, has been rising since 1980. Not quite as dramatically as the count of home runs, but still: from about 25°C to over 26°C.
Fine, so ballgames are played in conditions that are getting slowly warmer. Why would that result in more home runs? Because warmer air is less dense air, which means a ball that’s hit will face less resistance and thus travel farther in warmer air. So the Dartmouth scientists also examined the air density at baseball stadiums on game days over the years. Sure enough, it has trended downwards.
Still, why would this warming have more of an effect on home run hitting than the other possible factors? Good question, and that’s why the scientists weren’t content with the correlation the graphs suggest. They examined about 100,000 games more closely, and from those, over 220,000 “batted" balls. From 2015 onwards, the MLB has also tracked batted balls with high-resolution cameras, which provided data like the launch angle and speed. All this showed, for example, that for every 1°C rise in temperature in a game, there is a 1.83% increase in home runs hit. In summary, the scientists found that between 2010 and 2019, about 577 home runs—about 1% of the total in that time—were attributable to global warming. They anticipate global warming will result in hundreds more home runs per season in the future.
Back to the IPL, and “just" 15 sixes per game this season. What’s interesting about that stat is that it too has been rising. In the first IPL in 2008, batters hit only 10.72 sixes per match. That decreased to 8.75 in 2011, but has since risen to 15.
8.75 to 15: that’s a 70% increase in a dozen years. Global warming to blame here too?
Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun.
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