The Ball is Changing Again. Will We Notice?
One of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s stated goals has always been to make the game more appealing for younger generations of fans. The casual fan is usually more excited by lots of home runs than pitching duels, and in a crazy coincidence that nobody saw coming, home runs have been hit at record rates in the last few years. Consider the fact that five of the six seasons with the highest home run rates in major league history have happened since 2016. The lone exception was the 2000 season occurring in the middle of the steroid era which saw 5,693 round-trippers. In 2019, the most prolific homer-hitting season in history, over a thousand more than that were hit – 6,776, to be exact. Here’s a year-over-year of just how many more homers are being hit now than the mid-2010’s:
Season Home Runs Hit
2014 4,186
2015 4,909
2016 5,610
2017 6,105
2018 5,585
2019 6,776
The 2020 numbers were omitted since less than half of a full season was played, but the pace was not dissimilar from 2019. Did players get better at eating their greens from 2014 to 2019? Maybe. MLB and Rawlings officials have insisted that the ball wasn’t intentionally altered to create a more hitting-friendly environment, but something about the ball clearly changed. The trouble is, figuring out the science behind the composition changes of a regulation baseball – and why they appear to have had such a drastic impact – isn’t an exact science.
Part of the problem is that MLB wasn’t transparent with their quest for more long balls from the beginning. In the last few years, many pitchers – including Justin Verlander, Charlie Morton, Jake Odorizzi and Jacob deGrom – have called for an explanation from MLB. “If the ball’s different, and intentionally different,” Morton mused, “I guess the one thing I would ask is just some transparency.” Verlander was a little less reserved in his critique of the situation:
“It’s a f—ing joke,” Verlander told ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “Major League Baseball’s turning this game into a joke. They own Rawling, and you’ve got Manfred up here saying it might be the way they center the pill. They own the f—ing company. If any other $40 billion company bought out a $400 million company and the product changed dramatically, it’s not a guess as to what happened. We all know what happened. Manfred the first time he came in, what’d he say? He said we want more offense. All of a sudden he comes in, the balls are juiced? It’s not coincidence. We’re not idiots.”
Every pitcher who commented on the situation seemed to agree. Former Yankee C.C. Sabathia chimed in by remarking, “The ball is a little different — whether it’s the seams, it feels a little different in your hands.” Nationals ace Max Scherzer added, “We’re left, as players, wondering why the ball can change that much, that fast, and have that big of a result.”
Manfred rejected the notion that the league provided any direction to alter the composition of the baseball. “You know, the biggest flaw in that logic is that baseball somehow wants more home runs,” he added. “If you sat in an owner’s meeting and listened to people talk about the way our game’s being played, that is not the sentiment among the owners for whom I work. There is no desire on the part of ownership to increase the number of home runs in the game. To the contrary, they’re concerned about how many we have.”
That assertion is quite a different tune from what he and the owners used to be whistling, as Verlander alluded to. For whatever reason, the league does legitimately seem to feel now that the rapid increase in home runs is a problem, even if they don’t publicly claim to understand why it’s happening. An independent study commissioned by the league in 2018 found that “baseballs were flying greater distances through the air because of a decrease in wind resistance.” Why is that happening? They couldn’t tell you. “We cannot find a single property that we can measure that would account for decreased drag,” said Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois and the chairman of the study. The scientists determined that the “coefficient of restitution,” or the bounciness of the baseball, had not changed, despite the opinion of many of the league’s pitchers. Nathan went on to explain that the weight of the balls had not changed in a meaningful way, nor had the size of the ball itself or the height or size or material of the stitches and leather. It should be noted that astrophysicist Dr. Meredith Wills wrote up a very detailed piece for the Athletic in which she claims that the decrease in drag “could be traced back to an increase in lace thickness, which inadvertently produced a rounder baseball.” If I have to pick a side here, I’m going with the astrophysicist.
The league appears to be hanging its hat on the notion that manufacturing variations were at fault. Baseballs used in MLB games are hand-sewn in a Costa Rican factory, so naturally there’s a degree of variability in the process. According to Eno Sarris and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, MLB sent a memo last Friday to general managers, assistant general managers, and equipment managers outlining minor changes that might combine to reduce offense slightly in the 2021 season. The league explained in the memo that “one of the recommendations of (the committee conducting that study) has been to narrow the manufacturing specifications of the baseball in order to improve the consistency of the baseball’s performance.” The validity of this explanation is questionable, though, because the variability in the manufacturing process was present long before the home run rate skyrocketed.
Rawlings has produced new baseballs for this season’s use that have “loosened the tension of the first wool winding.” The new ball is 2.8 grams lighter and has slightly less bounce, effectively “deadening” the ball when contact is made. According to MLB in a footnote from the memo, an independent lab found that fly balls that went over 375 feet lost an average of one to two feet of batted ball distance with the new ball. An unnamed analytical source in Sarris and Rosenthal’s Athletic writeup claimed that “It’ll be like adding five feet of outfield walls to every wall in the big leagues.” The trouble is that it’s difficult to guess how much difference the new changes will make without a much larger sample to study the results. It seems like MLB is surprised by how much of an effect their first change to the ball had, so what if this is an over-correction? Or, what if it has some other unintended effects?
In short, yes, we will probably notice that a new baseball is being used this season. The players will almost definitely notice that it’s a new baseball. It will be fascinating to see how it all plays out, and presumably the league won’t shy away from tinkering with the ball further if it has to. Aside from counting how many homers are hit this year, it’s interesting to theorize how deadening the ball plays into Manfred’s overarching plans. If we see significantly fewer home runs hit in 2021, it’s possible Manfred may try to counteract the ball-deadening move by implementing other changes with the goal of putting the ball in play more often. Home runs are exciting, but base hits and highlight-reel defensive gems are a lot more fun than groundouts into the shift and endless strikeouts. The game has been heading the way of the “three true outcomes” (home runs, walks, and strikeouts) in the past decade, and if Manfred is to be believed, owners might not be too happy about that. Overused defensive shifts might be the next thing on the hot seat, and what about that Atlantic League experiment where the mound was moved back two feet in an effort to limit strikeouts? Add to that the universal DH, pitch clocks, automated strike zones, and any number of changes we’re bound to see in the upcoming CBA or later in the decade – and America’s favorite pastime is going to have a very different future.
