The Home Run Surge of the Late 1990s and 2000s: What the Numbers Show

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

The historical record shows show home runs per game jumping from 0.72 in 1992 to 1.17 in 2000. This article lays out the year-by-year rates, the 1998 chase, the 60-homer seasons and the timeline of drug testing, and says what the data cannot prove.

In 1992 the average major-league team hit 0.72 home runs per game. By 1996 the figure had climbed to 1.09, and in 2000 it reached 1.17, which is an increase of about 60 percent in eight seasons. It produced the loudest stretch in the sport's record book: six seasons of 60 or more home runs by three men in four years, after only two such seasons in the first 97 years of the century.

The surge is the most argued-over period in modern baseball, and the arguments tend to blur together three separate questions. How big was the rise, and when exactly did it start and stop? What changed in the game to cause it? And what does the era tell us about the players who starred in it? The first question has an answer in the numbers. The second has several partial answers, none of which can be proved from a database. The third involves allegations and legal findings that deserve careful language.

This article sticks to what the historical record through the 2025 season can show, adds the documented timeline of the sport's drug-testing rules, and marks clearly where the evidence stops. All rates are home runs or runs per team game, calculated from the historical team totals.

How the rate rose, year by year

The cleanest way to see the surge is to divide a season's home runs by the number of team games, which corrects for expansion and for shortened seasons. The table gives that rate, the runs per team game and the strikeouts per team game for selected years.

Two details deserve attention. The first is that the jump begins before the famous chase of 1998. The rate rose from 0.72 in 1992 to 0.89 in 1993, which was the first year of expansion to 28 teams, and then to 1.03 in 1994, the season that ended in a strike in August. In other words, most of the increase had happened four years before Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa made the front pages. The second is that the peak of the era was 2000, not 1998. The 1998 rate of 1.04 was lower than the rates of 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2006.

The strikeout column is the quieter story. Strikeouts per team game rose from 5.59 to 6.45 over the same span, and they kept rising for two more decades, passing 8 per team game by 2016. A hitter who swings for power accepts more strikeouts, and the data show the whole league making that trade.

The 1998 chase

The 1998 season is the one that people remember, and the numbers back that up. The historical record shows McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals with 70 home runs, Sosa of the Chicago Cubs with 66 and Ken Griffey of the Seattle Mariners with 56, and Greg Vaughn at 50. That made four hitters at 50 or more, the most in a single year up to that point. McGwire passed Roger Maris's total of 61 with his 62nd on September 8, and Sosa passed it days later. The two men were trading the lead for much of the summer, and attendance across the majors reached 70,601,147, according to the historical season record.

The chase did not make anyone's team a champion. The Cardinals finished 83-79 and the Cubs 90-73, good for a wild-card berth, and the Cubs were swept by Atlanta in the Division Series. The World Series went to the New York Yankees, who won 114 games in the regular season and beat the San Diego Padres four games to none. Sosa won the National League Most Valuable Player Award; McGwire, despite the 70, did not.

It is worth stating how much the chase was a post-strike story. The 1994 season had ended in August without a World Series, as the account of the 1994 strike explains, and attendance and goodwill took years to recover. A home run race that held the country's attention for months in 1998 is often credited with helping that recovery. That is a claim about fan sentiment, not a measurable result, and the attendance figures alone cannot separate the effect of the chase from other causes. What the record can say is that the sport drew over 70 million fans that year.

The 60-homer club

For most of the twentieth century 60 home runs was a boundary almost nobody crossed. Babe Ruth hit 60 in 1927 and Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961, and that was the entire list for 37 years. Then the list changed.

Between 1998 and 2001, three men hit 60 or more six times. The 73 that Barry Bonds hit in 2001, remains the record in the historical record through 2025. The 2001 leaders behind him were Sosa at 64 and Luis Gonzalez at 57, and the American League leader was Alex Rodriguez at 52.

The broader count of 50-homer seasons tells the same story. From 1920 through 1994, the historical record shows 18 seasons in which a player reached 50 home runs. From 1995 through 2007 it records 23. A single 13-year stretch had more of them than the previous 75 years together. After 2007 the number fell off: only 2010, 2013, 2017 (two players), 2019, 2022 and 2023 had one before 2024, which had two, and then four players reached 50 in 2025.

What changed in the game

No single factor explains the surge, and the honest position is that several plausible causes overlapped. Here are the main candidates, with what can and cannot be said about each.

• Expansion. The majors grew from 26 to 28 teams in 1993 and to 30 in 1998. More teams means more roster spots, and a view held by many observers was that the extra jobs thinned pitching talent. The surge did not stop when expansion did, so expansion cannot be the whole story.
• Ballparks. Several new parks opened in the period, and some are friendlier to hitters. Coors Field, which opened in Denver in 1995, is the clearest case, but one park cannot explain a league-wide rise, and the rate fell again in the middle of the 2000s while the parks stayed put.
• The strike zone. Many observers argued that the zone as called had shrunk in the 1990s. A change in how umpires call the zone would affect every park at once, but it is hard to prove from a database that does not record pitch locations.
• Equipment and training. Bats, weight training and nutrition changed, and hitters were bigger and stronger than their predecessors. That is an effect everyone agrees on in general terms and nobody can size precisely.
• The baseball itself. Some analysts argued the ball was livelier in the late 1990s, and the question has never been settled. The question comes back later in the story because the 2017 to 2019 home run rate was higher than anything in the surge and was also followed by debate about the ball.
• Performance-enhancing drugs. Steroids and related substances were used by some players. The extent of the use, the size of its effect and the identity of the users are all disputed, and there is no way to determine them from a statistics file.

What the data can say is that the rise happened league-wide, among hitters at every position, and it lasted for roughly a dozen years before settling. That is the pattern you would expect from a combination of causes, not from one.

The testing timeline

Whatever role drugs played, the rules about them changed in steps. The following timeline lists only the points that are well documented; for exact penalties and dates, check the league's published policy.

Two cautions are needed. A positive test, an admission and a mention in a report are three different kinds of evidence, and an article about statistics should not blur them. McGwire acknowledged in 2010 that he had used steroids during his career; other players named in the reports or in legal cases have denied or contested the claims. And the dates when use began or ended cannot be recovered from any list of seasons.

The home run rate in the data does move in the years after testing began. It was 1.12 in 2004, 1.03 in 2005, 1.11 in 2006 and 1.02 in 2007, and 0.95 by 2010. That pattern fits the idea that testing reduced the surge, and it also fits other explanations, including changes in the game's talent pool and in how pitchers were used. The numbers support the claim that the surge ended; they do not settle why.

Why the total did not fall back to the old level

If the surge was a temporary spike, the rate should have returned to the 0.72 of 1992. It did not. After 2010 it hovered between 0.86 and 1.02 until 2015, then rose again: 1.16 in 2016, 1.26 in 2017 and 1.39 in 2019, the highest in the historical record shows. Strikeouts per team game climbed in parallel, from 7.06 in 2010 to 8.81 in 2019.

That second wave happened with testing in place, and it shows why a one-cause story for the first wave is hard to defend. By 2019, by most accounts, hitters were swinging for power, pitchers were throwing harder and spinning more, and the game had shifted toward what analysts call three true outcomes: the home run, the walk and the strikeout. The account of the analytics era explains how front offices changed what they valued, and the physics of the curveball shows what modern pitchers are doing with spin. More recently, the pitch-clock era has changed the pace of play again; the rate was 1.21 in 2023, 1.12 in 2024 and 1.16 in 2025.

The reason the late 1990s and 2000s feel different from 2019 is runs. In 2000 the league scored 5.14 runs per team game; in 2019 it scored 4.83 despite the higher home run rate, because more of the offense was concentrated in home runs and the league struck out more. The surge of 1993 to 2001 was a run-scoring boom as well as a home run boom. The 2019 peak was not.

Putting a home run total in context

A home run total means little without the league around it. One simple method is to compare a player's total with the number of home runs hit in the whole major leagues that year. The table does that for four famous seasons, using the historical team totals.

By that measure, Ruth's 60 was a far bigger share of his sport than Bonds's 73, because the league total was so much smaller. It is a rough measure, since the number of teams changed, but it shows why historians treat Ruth's 1927 as a different kind of outlier. The league in 1927 hit 0.37 home runs per team game. In 1930 it hit 0.63, in 1961 it hit 0.95 and in 1968, the so-called Year of the Pitcher, it hit 0.61. The surge years, at around 1.0 to 1.2, are about three times the rate of 1927. For readers who want the early baseball context, the first modern World Series was played when a home run was a rare event, and the free agency era set up the incentives under which players were paid for production.

Common questions

When did the home run surge begin? The league rate rose from 0.72 per team game in 1992 to 1.03 in 1994, so the rise was under way before the 1998 chase. It peaked at 1.17 in 2000.

Who hit the most home runs in a season? Barry Bonds hit 73 in 2001, the record in the historical record through 2025. Mark McGwire hit 70 in 1998 and Sammy Sosa hit 66 that year.

Was 1998 the highest-scoring year? No. The league scored 4.79 runs per team game in 1998; the peak of the era was 5.14 in 2000.

Did testing end the surge? The rate fell after testing began, but other factors changed at the same time, and the rate rose again after 2015 under a stricter program. The data cannot isolate the effect.

Is the record book unreliable for these years? The statistics are accurate as records of what happened on the field. What is disputed is the cause and the fairness of comparisons with other eras, and that is a question for readers to weigh.

Where to go next

To see how the numbers fit a longer story, read about how the analytics era reshaped the front office, the 1994 strike that came just before the surge, and how to read a box score to track the home runs yourself. Current leaders in every category are on the leaders pages, and the topic page for stats and analytics collects more.