The Effects of the USA Bat Change on Little League World Series Home Runs

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• Little League World Series Bat Tracker

The great irony of making a field and bat standard that allows fewer home runs is that it overvalues the kids who can hit home runs. Instead of creating value in a small ball, it gives the teams who can beat it out of the park more value than they should. For example, Japan, Curacao, and South Korea hit more than 50% of the home runs in this year’s series. Those were the top 3 teams in the international division. Louisiana, Virginia, and Hawaii hit home runs on the US; they were the top 3 in that division. For 2019, two Grand Slams fundamentally changed the nature of the finals. Only Venezuela hit one home run and didn’t make the top 6. Everyone else, a total of 9 other teams, hit a big zero.

The dearth of home runs in the LLWS is an easy horse to beat. It’s evident to anyone who watches this stuff that the USA bat standard came too far back, much as BBCOR did in College. Outfielders in the LLWS this year often had their heels at a generous 150. But, unlike NCAA, they can’t regulate a baseball change to help them fly further and keep the “integrity” of the game. So, are we just stuck now? Raise your hand if you think USA baseball is up for changing the bat standard to something between where they were and where they are now.

And the age change didn’t help deep balls either.

In 2006 Williamsport had the fences in at 205 and moved them out because of too many home runs and a game that didn’t allow for extra-base hits (that weren’t home runs). Now, the bat standard made dingers in the big dance a fantasy for 96% of players who make it to Williamsport. If we move the fences back in, we take away extra-base hits, and if we keep it out, we remove one of the best parts of the game for Little Leaguers. Isn’t there a happy medium around 210? It’s worth a shot.

In any event, we watched every at-bat and tracked many things. Here’s some of that data in graph form. You can find more of that information as we put it here in the entries below.

Updated 8/27/2019 – 3:05 pm MST: Armed with all the data, we made a couple of charts showing the Home Run data we captured during the 2019 Little League World Series. It looks something like this:

Well, what can we say? Through 32 games, fifteen home runs were hit. That’s down from 18 hits last year and 60 in 2017. Here are some other exciting things to think about:

1. 9 of the 16 teams never hit a home run in a game. Each team played at least three games.
2. Only 2 USA teams had a kid who hit a home run. Of the 15 total in 2019, only three came from the US side. In the 16 games the US was a part of; they only hit home runs in 2.
3. The tournament would have had five home runs if it weren’t for Curacao, Japan, and South Korea.
4. The home run rate per game is .468. In the MLB, it is 1.37 this year. The College World Series, even with Ameritrade park standing in the way, is around 1.0 HR per game.
5. There was one home run in the final four games, arguably the best four teams in the world.

During the 2019 LLWS, we tracked home runs by game. Here’s our chart.