Baseball Is Broken – Slate Magazine

Around 10 p.m. EDT Tuesday night, Brad Miller yanked a 2–1 slider from Brandon Maurer over the right-field wall in Kauffman Stadium, drawing the Rays to within a run of the Royals at 3–2 in a game they’d lose 6–2. The homer wasn’t anything special in itself, save for being the 5,000^th home run of the 2017 season. It’s the 12^th time in baseball history, all since expansion to 30 teams in 1998, that we’ve had at least 5,000 home runs hit in a single season. At the current pace, the record for home runs in a season, currently 5,693, will be broken with plenty of time to spare (as one insightful analyst predicted in April). There’s a chance we see 6,000 home runs hit this season, though the usual slowdown in power output in September will affect that.