Three reasons Eric Hosmer might be launching Royals’ most credible threat to Steve Balboni’s record in years

Eric Hosmer is not going to break the Royals’ antique franchise home-run record. We’re pretty sure about this. We think. Probably.

Hosmer is not going to break the record for a lot of reasons, many of them the same reasons that none of the 627 men to swing a bat for the Royals in the last 30 years have matched the 36 home runs Steve Balboni hit in 1985.

So the record is safe. We think. Probably. If Hosmer reaches 30 home runs, that would be 11 more than his career high, and more than any Royal since Jermaine Dye in 2000.

Let’s be very clear: This is not a prediction that Hosmer will break a record that survived Bo Jackson and Carlos Beltran and the steroid era, and is now older than some doctors.

It’s just that, well, Hosmer may be onto something here.

The Royals have not had such a pure hitter since Billy Butler was young, and with a hot summer Hosmer could at least approach baseball’s smallest franchise home-run record. Either way, he is having the kind of season for which he will likely field offers of $100 million or more when he becomes a free agent after next season.

As it stands, Hosmer is on pace for 32 home runs.

He is hitting .327 with a .388 on-base and .553 slugging percentage. He ranks in the American League’s top 10 in each of those stats, plus runs, hits, total bases, doubles, runs created, and more.

His numbers are only a modest increase over where he was a year ago, but there are reasons he will follow a very good 2015 with a great 2016.

The first is the simplest: age. Hosmer is 26, the beginning of that sweet overlap of experience and youth, that career window when ballplayers tend to be the best they’ll ever be. Typically, hitters’ power peaks around 28 or 29, so Hosmer’s best years are likely in front of him. This is also his sixth big-league season, which means enough experience that he could reach his peak earlier — and maintain it longer — than most.

The second is perhaps the most intriguing: home runs are being hit at a historic pace. A year ago the league’s home-run total jumped by more than 17 percent, the biggest one-year increase since 1996, and a jump that historically has been explained only by new types of baseballs or rampant PED use.

This year the home-run rate has actually increased again, in terms of both percentage of plate appearances (2.8) and percentage of fly balls (12.2). It’s a curious trend, one that has inspired theories from juiced balls to new bats. Nobody knows exactly what’s going on, but they all recognize that it is going on.

In many recent years Royals home-run hitters have been swinging against not just the spacious dimensions of their home stadium but league-wide trends that suppressed the long ball. Now Hosmer can ride the draft of an increasingly home-run-friendly league.

The third reason is the most Hosmer-centric. Whenever the subject of the Royals and homers comes up, it doesn’t take long before someone says something like, Yeah, but it’s just so hard to hit homers at The K.

Once, a hitting coach was fired largely because he wasn’t emphasizing home runs enough. When his replacement — after not even two months, by the way — essentially threw up his hands and said, “There is no reward here to try and hit home runs,” well, then he was fired, too.

But the math is a little different with Hosmer. He is not nearly as affected by Kauffman Stadium’s big outfield. Since the start of last season, Hosmer has hit exactly half of his home runs at home, even with fewer plate appearances. His teammates have hit 82 on the road and 68 at home.

When Hosmer homers, the stadium’s dimensions tend to be irrelevant. He does not traffic in cheap home runs.

He built his swing in batting cages not far from the beaches of South Florida, his spare time filled with the steady crack-crack-crack while his friends played in the waves and sand. From the very beginning, his was a swing that often straddled the line between precision and violence.

As he has grown more comfortable in the big leagues, he has refined the violence and increased the precision. He stands 6-feet-4 with enough strength in his legs and upper body to generate plenty of power with a smoother swing.

Scouts are noticing that he is laying off some pitches out of the strike zone that he used to chase — an observation backed by PITCHf/x data — meaning he sees more pitches he can drive.

Using the awesome Home Run Tracker, Hosmer is averaging 423.6 feet per home run, second only to Miami’s Christian Yelich (432.2). According to the site, all but one of Hosmer’s home runs — a fly ball on a windy day in Seattle that stretched over the right-field fence — would have been home runs in at least 24 stadiums in neutral weather.

Six of the eight — including a pulverization of Steven Wright’s knuckleball over the batters’ eye at The K on Wednesday — would have been homers in 28 or more.

Put one more way: Hosmer is the only man in baseball with four homers measured by the site at 440 feet or longer. The Twins’ Byung Ho Park has three. Nobody else has more than two — not Giancarlo Stanton, not Miguel Cabrera, not Jose Bautista.

Outfield dimensions just don’t mean that much for Hosmer’s homers. What matters is how hard he hits the ball, and by scouts’ judgments and various metrics, he is hitting the ball harder than ever.

It won’t be enough to break Balboni’s record. We don’t think, anyway. Probably not.

But for reasons both in and out of his control, Hosmer may be in the beginning stages of the mark’s most credible threat in years.

This story was originally published May 19, 2016 at 11:45 AM with the headline "Three reasons Eric Hosmer might be launching Royals’ most credible threat to Steve Balboni’s record in years."