 How
many home runs could have Sadaharu Oh hit in the major
leagues? Japanese fans have proclaimed Oh's 868 career
home runs a world record, and American detractors have
tried to discredit it. With compressed bats, weaker
pitching and smaller ballparks, there are plenty of
reason to doubt that Oh would have hit a total of 868
home runs for a major league team. There really is no way to measure
the influence of different bats and supposedly weaker
pitching, but from examining the size of ballparks, it is
possible to gain a fresh perspective on Oh's hitting. So
let's ask a slightly different question: how many home
runs would Oh have likely hit in a major league-sized
park?
Well,
what is a major league-sized park? Part of the problem
here is that there is no standard distance from any
outfield to home plate--every stadium is different.
Consider Fenway Park. The right field foul pole is listed
at a distance of 302 feet from home plate--but a few feet
toward center field, and you'd have to hit a ball almost
360 feet to clear the fence. And then there's the Green
Monster, a wall that defies comparison.
In
fact, most Major League parks have odd dimensions. Still,
the average lengths are as follows: 331.2 feet to the
left field foul pole, 329.6 to right, and 404.8 to
center. Excluding Fenway, the shortest distances are 312
to left and 314 to right (both at Yankee Stadium--where
the left field fence is banked much like Fenway's right
field) and 400 to straight-away center (several parks).
Therefore, to be conservative, let's say that any
ballpark with at least 310 feet (95 meters) down the foul
lines and 400 feet (122 meters) to center is Major League
size.
Measured
against those distances, only six of Japan's eleven
present ballparks fit the bill. The first of those--the
Tokyo Dome--was opened in 1988, six years after Oh
retired. Clearly the man with 868 home runs hit all of
them in smaller ballparks than his Major League
counterparts. But how much smaller?
First,
let's take a look at the place Oh hit most of his home
runs--the Yomiuri Giants' Korakuen Stadium. Measuring
91.44 meters (298 feet) down the foul lines, and 118.9
meters (388 feet) to center, Oh was at least twelve feet
closer to the fence than Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron or anyone
else in the majors. Hiroshima Municipal Stadium, probably
the smallest park Oh ever hit a home run in, measures a
paltry 91.4 meters (298 feet) down the lines and 115.8
meters (378 feet) to center--about twenty two feet
shorter than even the smallest Major League stadiums.
Without
doubt, quite a few of Oh's homers were deep pop flies
that barely cleared the fence--and would have been outs,
singles or doubles in a larger park. One might be tempted
to credit Oh with playing about one-tenth of his games in
huge Koshien stadium. Though the ballpark now has
more-or-less Major League dimensions, until the late
1980s (about a decade after Oh retired), the Tigers home
ballpark had a special lucky zone (created by a
shallow chain link fence) that increased the number of
home runs. Round trippers are now far less common at
Koshien than they were during Oh's career.
But
would Oh still have passed either Ruth's or Aaron's
record? It looks doubtful.
Without
going back and searching for measurements on every one of
his round trippers, probably the easiest way to make an
estimate is to look at the rate of home runs at
contemporary Japanese parks. In 1996, 490 home runs were
hit in 303 games at Japan's four Major League-sized
parks--an average of 1.62 homers per match. In contrast,
the smaller seven parks (including Koshien) featured 850
homers in 402 games, for an average of 2.11 per game. In
1997, the larger parks allowed 1.60 round trippers a game
while the five small fields featured 1.97
What's
the significance? Well, Oh was hitting in those same
small parks (or ones with nearly identical measurements)
in which on average two home runs were hit per game. But
what if he had been playing in the larger parks, which on
average allowed only three-quarter as many home runs? It
seems likely that he would have hit about twenty-five
percent fewer home runs. Instead of 868 free trips around
the bases, Oh would have had only about 650.
While
not a world record, 650 is still a rather impressive
number. Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays are the
only players who have more, and that's quite impressive
company to be in.
However,
in this entire discussion about ballpark sizes, one might
remember Bobby Thompson's "Shot Heard Round the
World"--a 280 foot line drive that cleared the
shallow left field fence at the Polo Grounds to win the
New York Giants the 1951 pennant. Today, that wouldn't be
a home run in any Major League or Japanese stadium. If
the Polo Grounds, had smaller dimensions along the foul
lines than any Japanese ballpark, shouldn't we also
question whether N.Y. Giant Willie Mays would have hit so
many home runs if he played at the cavernous Fukuoka Dome
or windy Chiba Marine Stadium?
Though
the question of whether Oh's 868 home runs are a true
world record will forever remain unresolved, it's
important to realize that most Japanese players are now
hitting home runs in ballparks just as big as those in
the Major Leagues. Should a Japanese player break Aaron's
record in the future, it will be much harder to denigrate
his accomplishment.
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