“It’s more like baseball.”

The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell reports on the sudden drop in the number of home runs over the past two seasons as compared to the seasons of the late ’90s and early ’00s. [UweBlog]

Suddenly, a sport that produced 5,386 home runs in 2006 is on pace for 4,442 this year — a 17.5 percent drop, or a loss of almost 1,000 home runs in just two seasons.

Boswell connects the continued steroid investigations of Clemens and Bonds to the renewed natural feel of the game. Washington Nationals’ pitching coach Randy St. Claire thinks it’s great for the game because players have begun to look like “ballplayers again, like they looked when [he] was growing up, not like musclemen.”

If the arrival of the Steroid Age was gradual, arriving full-blown in the late ’90s, then peaking with 5,693 homers in the insane season of 2000, when 47 players hit at least 30 homers, then its reversal might come quite quickly. This spring, only 24 players are on pace for at least 30 home runs.

“A ‘cold spring’ doesn’t account for an almost 20 percent drop in home runs in two years,” Orioles President Andy MacPhail said. “It’s foolish not to think there’s some correlation to more drug testing and all the [legal] attention [on steroids]. There are still people out there trying to cheat. There will always be people who try to get around the rules one way or another. But there are not as many now.” 

In the article, Boswell also acknowledges the flip side of this change in the game: people really love home runs.

“From a personal and aesthetic point of view, I like this kind of baseball better,” MacPhail said. “I like a well-played game more than a slugfest. But plenty of fans like runs.” 

Will the 55 home runs that Lance Berkman is predicted to hit be enough to keep the fan that has come to expect 60-75?