Building more hitter-friendly parks? Hitters lifting more weights to get stronger? Steroids… Not factors. Sean Hackbarth was watching when Tim McCarver leaped from sports commentator to science reporter:
On Fox Sports’ coverage of Saturday’s Milwaukee Brewers-St. Louis Cardinals baseball game analyst Tim McCarver theorized about why home runs seems to be flying out of ball parks. He thinks it’s global warming/climate change:
Tim McCarver: “[T]he air is thinning…. There have been climatic changes over the last 50 years…. I think that’s one of the reasons balls are carrying much better now.”
Joe Buck [Fox Sports play-by-play announcer]: “So that’s your ‘inconvenient truth’ about it?”
McCarver: “You’re going to find it out one of these days, yes.”
For what it’s worth, the air isn’t “thinning.” The greenhouse effect is supposedly the result of having too much stuff up in the atmosphere, not too little. McCarver is confusing the so-called ozone hole, which is probably periodic and related to the solar cycle, with the entire atmosphere. But if the air was “thinning,” the effects would be greater than a few home runs in baseball parks. Earth would probably get cooler, as there would be less atmosphere to trap and hold heat from the sun.
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