Who hit the most irrelevant home run of the 2021 MLB season?
By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer
There were 5,944 home runs hit in the 2021 MLB regular season, many memorable for their length or significance to the outcome of a particular game. But which one mattered the least?
In general, home runs matter. They don't eradicate global income inequality or end the pandemic, but home runs are cool.
We remember them; they stick in our minds like gum under a desk. Round-trippers punctuate games and break up the monotony of our sad, lonely lives. If you’re cooking dinner, and there’s a baseball game on in the background and someone homers, you’ll press pause on smashing garlic for that puttanesca to peep yourself a four-bagger.
The deadball era died for a reason: Long balls rock. Think of the five most iconic moments in MLB history. The list is almost exclusively homers: Kirk Gibson, Bobby Thomson, Bill Maz, Joey Bats and, like, Dave Roberts stealing second base. By the way, did you hear about Dave Roberts stealing second base? Pretty cool.
The five greatest home runs in MLB postseason history — Ben Verlander I Flippin' Bats
But while the majority of memorable moments are homers, not all homers are memorable. There are, in any given season, a hefty helping of completely pointless ding-dongs, big flies that had absolutely no bearing on the game in question and no impact on the baseball year as a whole.
That got me wondering: Of the 5,944 blasts in 2021, which was the least important? Which dinger was the inconsequential GOAT? Who knocked the year’s most irrelevant tater?
Let the investigation begin.
Step 1: Low impact on the game
Any MLB game, even one between hapless, adrift teams light-years out of postseason contention, can be entertaining in its own right. Cleveland played Kansas City and Detroit a combined 16 times in September. Those games had no bearing on the trajectory of the MLB season, and you, my dear reader, probably watched few or none of them. Still, some of those contests, such as Cleveland’s 5-3 victory in 11 innings on Sept. 1, were Good Baseball Games.
Our first task in finding the most irrelevant homer of 2021 is to filter out the taters that notably altered the course of a particular game. The ones with tension, intrigue, suspense and all that good stuff? We want none of that. So say hello to win probability added.
For those unacquainted, WPA is a stat that measures the percent change in outcome that a particular play causes in a given game. A walk-off home run will have an enormous WPA, while a ground-ball out in the seventh inning of a blowout will have a minuscule WPA. Stathead has a pretty sweet function called Pivotal Play Finder that allows you to sort every single play in MLB history by its win probability added.
According to the Pivotal Play Finder, 489 home runs in 2021 had a WPA under .01. In other words, 489 home runs had less than a 1% impact on the outcome of the game. Those 489 garbage-time taters are where our journey begins.
Step 2: Low impact on the season
Good baseball teams can scram. Our least important home run has to be from a game that involved two teams out of postseason contention, either statistically or emotionally. We’re looking for a game that had no bearing on the final season standings.
That removes all homers from games involving the 10 postseason clubs, plus Seattle, Toronto, Oakland and Philly, who were all still in the mix in the season’s final week. I’m also going to remove the teams that tied for MLB's worst record, the Orioles and Diamondbacks, because a tiebreaker ended up gifting Baltimore the No. 1 pick in the draft. For better or worse, every game ended up mattering for those two 110-loss husks.
489 homers → 105 homers
Also, in the beginning of the season, when the crisp, spring air is ripe with hope, every team’s games matter. All clubs are, at least in theory, still in contention. So let’s remove any dinger hit in the first half of the season, when optimism is still high in all 30 ballparks. The Braves were 1.5 games behind the Nationals in the NL East on July 1, after all.
105 homers → 53 homers
Meanwhile, a number of our "noncontender teams" — such as the Mets, Padres and Reds — were very much in the playoff race all the way until mid-September. If we filter out all their big flies before they fell out of contention, that nixes another 20 homers and whittles our number down to 33.
53 homers → 33 homers
Step 3: Away homers only
Now let's eliminate all the home homers. Because if hit by the home team, even the most irrelevant homer in a foregone game is cause for celebration. The in-stadium fireworks still fly, the lights still flicker, and the loud house music still blares as the humble, homering hero touches ‘em all.
You never know what will make a kid a baseball fan for life. Home runs hit by home teams are too potentially impactful, too theoretically life-changing. We want away homers only.
33 homers → eight homers
The elite eight (*March Madness voice*)
Ooooooeeee, look at that. What a beautiful crew of purposeless jacks, a truly delightful assortment of meaningless big flies. No one on this list received MVP or Cy Young votes, no one is a big-name free agent, and no one is chasing big milestones. That makes the next slice even more difficult.
As much as it pains me, our next cut — or cuts — are the three Cubs taters from the Aug. 13 game. The Chirinos homer was too early in the game to be the most irrelevant, and the Schwindel and Happ homers created too much of a potential "incredible comeback" vibe. Also, those were absolute moon shots. We’re nitpicking now.
Eight homers → five homers
Five homers: If a home run falls in an empty stadium, does it make a sound?
Sorry, Jesús Aguilar. There were just too many people present for that homer to be irrelevant, maybe because it was a day game, and people stay longer at day games because they don’t have to be home for bedtime. The stinky Rockies drawing more than 34,000 people for an August game against Miami is a whole other conversation.
Four homers: A note about salary arbitration
Statistics determine compensation. It’s a fact of the world, baseball and beyond. Every single, every strikeout and, crucially to our exercise here, every home run both hit and allowed plays an incremental role in how much a player is eventually paid.
Now, the compensation rules are subject to change, depending on how things shake out in the new collective bargaining agreement, but Cleveland OF Franmil Reyes is currently in his first year of arbitration. That means 2021 was his platform year. Arbitration is complex, but for the purposes of this experiment, you just need to know that a player's statistics in his season before his first arbitration are incredibly important. Those numbers — along with a player’s career stats to that point — set a baseline in arbitration that will impact his earnings over the following few seasons.
For that reason, Reyes is off our list. A power hitter such as he needs all the taters he can get. There’s a chance the tater in question — which, if you like round numbers, was important because Reyes finished the season with exactly 30 bombs — earned him at least an extra $20,000. That’s a lucrative long ball.
Three homers: What about the pitchers?
When I started sifting through all the homers, the July 19 Miguel Rojas home run stuck out to me. The game featured two bad teams trapped in a hilariously lopsided contest, and it had the perfect kind of pitcher/hitter matchup: nobody incredible but nobody in danger of getting released. Also, the Nationals’ home broadcast call is a trip; referring to a guy as a "Nats killer" in an 18-1 game is top-notch analysis.
But then, on Nov. 30, right before the CBA expiration deadline, the Nationals non-tendered Wander Suero. The guy was cut with just hours to go, the thinnest of margins, and is now a free agent. The hard-throwing reliever will likely pitch in the bigs again, but I can’t help but wonder if the Nats would have kept him had he allowed 10 home runs and not 11. And any home run that might've led to a non-tender cannot be deemed King Irrelevant.
Also, at the time of the tater, the Nats hadn’t yet torn down their roster and were still above the Braves in the standings.
Two homers: Every tater has a story
This all leads me to Andrew Albers.
Albers grew up in Canada, one of only nine MLB players ever to come from Saskatchewan. He was drafted by the Padres in 2008 after a legendary career at the University of Kentucky.
Then he had Tommy John surgery, got released, played independent ball in Quebec, got picked up by the Twins, worked his way up the minors, made the big leagues, was bad, went to Korea, came back, pitched one game in the majors with Toronto, played indie ball again, rejoined the Twins for a year, got his first career save with Seattle, spent three years in Japan, made an NPB all-star game with the Orix Buffaloes and then in 2021 came back a third time to the Twins, for whom he allowed the second-least important home run of the season to Bobby Bradley.
Albers has lived a baseball life, traveled a true journeyman’s journey. He has taken buses and planes and trains to and from places you and I will never go. He is one of the many players who operate on the periphery of our baseball-watching consciousness, never on your fantasy team but perpetually around in the back of a bad bullpen. And now, at age 36, he is a free agent yet again.
Maybe Albers has one last roar left. Maybe he’s one tweak away from pulling a Rich Hill. Maybe he signs with the Twins again and battles his way back to the bigs. Maybe.
If he doesn’t, that Sept. 15 outing against Cleveland will have been his final big-league hurrah. And nothing about a last gasp is irrelevant. I hope you live forever, Andrew Albers.
Our champion
Since 2015, Miguel Rojas has been a rock for the Marlins, a steadying figure in a turbulent time. He's the proverbial "hold the fan base’s hand through the darkness" player and a genuine joy machine. Rojas has meant a lot to the franchise and the city over the past six years. But this homer didn’t mean bupkis.
The Fish were down big when Rojas homered late in a game that had no bearing on the postseason race, on the road, after many fans had left. The Venezuelan shortstop signed a two-year, $10 million extension with Miami after the regular season, but reaching nine homers in 2021 did not significantly alter the defensive specialist’s payday. Rockies reliever Yency Almonte struggled to a 7.55 ERA in 2021 and was unfortunately a candidate to be outrighted whether or not Rojas took him yard.
This wasn’t a bomb, and it wasn’t a wall-scraper. It wasn’t a moon shot or a laser beam. It was hit in a stadium right in the middle of the pack for homers in 2021. A fan didn’t make a great play on the ball. It wasn’t a milestone, and it was hardly a memory.
But now I hope it lives forever.
Some final thoughts
To be honest, I was expecting to find way more irrelevant home runs. Maybe bad teams don’t often blow out other bad teams late in the season? Maybe bad teams don’t hit many home runs? Whatever the reason, I was surprised and delighted by how impactful even the forgettable dingers turned out to be.
After all, any big fly in the majors is cause for celebration. It’s difficult to reach the bigs, and it’s even more difficult to thrive there. I just wish Miguel Rojas had bat-flipped his lumber to Mars.
Maybe next year.
Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.
