Posted at 11:41 a.m., Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Baseball: Home runs drop to lowest level in a decade
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Home runs in the major leagues this year dropped to their lowest level in more than a decade.An average of 2.04 homers per game were hit this season, the Elias Sports Bureau said today, a drop of 8.1 percent from last year's 2.22 average and the lowest figure in the majors since the 1995 average of 2.02.
Cold weather in April caused a 20 percent drop in the first month of the season, when the average was 1.84.
Scoring was down 1.3 percent, from 9.72 runs per game in 2006 to 9.59 this year. Hits per game dropped a tad, from 18.6 to 18.5, and the major league batting average fell from .269 to .268. The ERA dropped from 4.52 to 4.46.
The average time of a nine-inning game crept back up 3 minutes to 2:51.
