The Home Run Explosion Is Not Exactly Beyond Suspicion

Fans at Fenway Park watching a home run sail overhead this month.The record-setting 5,694th home run of the 2017 season soared over the right-center-field fence in Toronto earlier this week. And the talk afterward among coaches and players centered on launch angles and physics and miraculous epiphanies about the virtue of pulling the baseball.

Haven’t we seen this show before?

I wandered the nation writing on national politics in 1998, and each night I tuned in to watch Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire wallop balls into the farthest reaches of St. Louis and Wrigley. Oh, baby, those balls never came down.

McGwire and Sosa had big bats and biceps that would have made Popeye blush, and they…