Study: Climate change, rising temperature affect baseball games’ results

08 / 04 / 2023

• Knowledge Bank
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A new study highlighted that the results of baseball games are affected by rising temperature resulting from global warming as warmer temperatures reduce the density of air and as baseball is a game of ballistics, thus getting a batted ball to fly farther.

The new Dartmouth study raised a question “Could baseball be on the cusp of a “climate-ball” era where higher temperatures due to global warming increasingly determine the outcome of a game?”

The study found that more than 500 home runs since 2010 can be attributed to higher-than-average temperatures resulting from climate change—with several hundred more home runs per season to come with future warming.

There’s a very clear physical mechanism at play in which warmer temperatures reduce the density of air. Baseball is a game of ballistics, and a batted ball is going to fly farther on a warm day.

While the researchers attribute only 1% of recent home runs to climate change, they found that rising temperatures could account for 10% or more of home runs by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions and climate change continue unabated.

“There’s a very clear physical mechanism at play in which warmer temperatures reduce the density of air. Baseball is a game of ballistics, and a batted ball is going to fly farther on a warm day,” says senior author Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography.

The authors of the study analyzed more than 100,000 major league games and 220,000 individual hits to correlate the number of home runs with the occurrence of unseasonably warm temperatures. They then estimated the extent to which the reduced air density that results from higher temperatures was the driving force in the number of home runs on a given day compared to other games.

Lead author Christopher Callahan, a doctoral candidate in geography who conceived of the study, said the researchers accounted for factors such as the use of performance-enhancing drugs, the construction of bats and balls, and the adoption of cameras, launch analytics, and other technology intended to optimize a batter’s power and distance.

“We asked whether there are more home runs on unseasonably warm days than on unseasonably cold days during the course of a season,” Callahan said. “We’re able to compare those days with the implicit assumption that the other factors affecting batter performance don’t vary day to day or are affected if a day is unseasonably warm or cold.”

“We don’t think temperature is the dominant factor in the increase in home runs—batters are now primed to hit balls at optimal speeds and angles,” Callahan continued. “That said, temperature matters and we’ve identified its effect. While climate change has been a minor influence so far, this influence will substantially increase by the end of the century if we continue to emit greenhouse gases and temperatures rise.”

The researchers examined each major league ballpark in the United States to gauge how the average number of home runs per year could rise with each 1-degree Celsius (1.8-degree Fahrenheit) increase in the global average temperature. The actual number of runs per season due to temperature could be higher or lower depending on individual gameday conditions.

Night games would lessen the influence that temperature and air density have on the distance a ball travels, and covered stadiums such as Tropicana Field would nearly eliminate it, the researchers report. Curbing the rise in home runs—and thus the excitement they bring to a game—might seem counterproductive, but there are additional factors to consider as global temperatures rise, particularly the exposure of players and fans to heat, Justin Mankin, Assistant Professor of Geograohy, said.

“A key question for the organization at large is what’s an acceptable level of heat exposure for everybody and what’s the acceptable cost for maximizing home runs,” Mankin said. “Home runs are one pathway by which temperature is affecting game play, but there are other pathways that are more concerning because they have human risk attached to them.”

The enormous wealth of data available for major league games provided a unique opportunity to identify the repercussions of climate change on a cultural institution, Mankin said. Climate scientists focus on the increased likelihood and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and heat waves because of the far-reaching devastation these events wreak—and because there are records to study them.

“Major League Baseball is a multibillion-dollar industry that is very data-rich, and that privilege allowed us to identify the effect of climate. This critical cultural touchstone for what it means to be American also happens to have a very salient relationship with physics in that temperature actually affects game play,” Mankin said.

“It is really difficult to document how climate change is affecting cultural institutions and forms of recreation generally,” he said. “For most cultural institutions, we simply don’t have the data. In fact, we struggle to track climate impacts around the world because of data poverty. A project like this makes me worry that warming is affecting so many other things we just can’t document.”

Co-author Jeremy DeSilva, professor and chair of Department of Anthropology, said evaluating the effect of climate change on cultural institutions can resonate with people’s daily lives more so than large-scale disasters that can appear random and beyond anyone’s control. That can lead to change. Baseball has been a touchpoint for social change in the past, from desegregation to growing corporatization and the outsized influence of money.

“Baseball is one of these ways that American society holds a mirror up to itself and global climate change is just another example—baseball is not immune to it,” DeSilva said.

“This kind of study can be an entry point to understanding a phenomenon that is affecting the planet and every individual on it,” he said. “Maybe people who otherwise wouldn’t have will think about, and have a bigger conversation about, the more impactful and dangerous aspects of climate change once they know how it’s affecting this quintessential game in the history of our country.”