Hot Bats, Hot Planet

In his column today, George Will, a climate change skeptic, says there's been a cooling trend since 1998. Jonathan Chait cries foul, and in a comment on Chait's post, "Rhubarbs," a former Washington Post contributor or reporter, turns Will's passion about baseball against him:

Someone needs to forward this chart to Will:

baseballanalysts.com/.../was_the_1990s_h.php

Because it turns out home-run production has followed an eerily similar course to global warming over the last century. Except rather than hitting a record peak in 1998, home runs peaked in 2001. So using Will's logic, the fact that there were fewer home runs in 2006 than there were in 2001 proves that home runs are not increasing over time, even though five times as many home runs were hit in 2006 than in 1919.

Ergo the last twenty years of Will's bitching about the increasing offense in baseball is proved to be [BS]. QED.

Given that Will has written much more, and clearly cares more passionately about, baseball than global warming, I would think that applying the "logic" of his climate assertions to debunk his baseball assertions might just have a motivating effect on the man.