Juiced Baseballs

[Beans]

Forget the Astros. What really threatens public trust in the sport is the baseball itself. The "juiced baseball" was a huge storyline last season, but the inconsistency of MLB's baseballs has been a thing for years.

 

2019: In April, Rob Arthur over at BP found that the ball had lower drag due to lower seam height, and that was later corroborated by MLB. Discussion heated up at the All-Star Game, when Justin Verlander said MLB had intentionally "juiced" the ball, citing its purchase of Rawlings in 2018, and it came back as a storyline in the postseason when balls appeared to have been "de-juiced."

2018: A committee concluded in an 84-page report that increased home run rates were due to "changes in the aerodynamic properties of the baseball itself, specifically to those properties affecting the drag"—but they couldn't determine why those changes had occurred.

2014: Following the lowest-scoring non-strike year since 1976, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred reportedly approached the players union about wrapping the ball tighter to make it fly farther.

2000: A study funded by MLB and Rawlings found that "two baseballs could meet MLB specifications for construction but one ball could be theoretically hit 49.1 feet further."

The game's most essential piece of equipment—one that affects every pitch, every player, every team, every championship—is either being intentionally modified to produce certain results or unintentionally altered from batch to batch.

 

Either MLB is lying, or the league just can't manufacture a consistent baseball. The latter might be worse, as it makes you wonder whether the baseball has ever been consistent.

 

MLB senior VP Morgan Sword spoke to this in December, saying that the baseball world needs to "accept the fact that the baseball is going to vary" and that "the baseball has varied in its performance probably for the entire history of our sport."

Baseball has a transparency problem, right down to its literal core, but will this change the way you guys see the game?

Edited February 20, 2020 by Beans

[Boxcar]

Forget the Astros. What really threatens public trust in the sport is the baseball itself. The "juiced baseball" was a huge storyline last season, but the inconsistency of MLB's baseballs has been a thing for years.

 

2019: In April, Rob Arthur over at BP found that the ball had lower drag due to lower seam height, and that was later corroborated by MLB. Discussion heated up at the All-Star Game, when Justin Verlander said MLB had intentionally "juiced" the ball, citing its purchase of Rawlings in 2018, and it came back as a storyline in the postseason when balls appeared to have been "de-juiced."

2018: A committee concluded in an 84-page report that increased home run rates were due to "changes in the aerodynamic properties of the baseball itself, specifically to those properties affecting the drag"—but they couldn't determine why those changes had occurred.

2014: Following the lowest-scoring non-strike year since 1976, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred reportedly approached the players union about wrapping the ball tighter to make it fly farther.

2000: A study funded by MLB and Rawlings found that "two baseballs could meet MLB specifications for construction but one ball could be theoretically hit 49.1 feet further."

The game's most essential piece of equipment—one that affects every pitch, every player, every team, every championship—is either being intentionally modified to produce certain results or unintentionally altered from batch to batch.

 

Either MLB is lying, or the league just can't manufacture a consistent baseball. The latter might be worse, as it makes you wonder whether the baseball has ever been consistent.

 

MLB senior VP Morgan Sword spoke to this in December, saying that the baseball world needs to "accept the fact that the baseball is going to vary" and that "the baseball has varied in its performance probably for the entire history of our sport."

Baseball has a transparency problem, right down to its literal core, but will this change the way you guys see the game?

 

It made me laugh when Giancarlo Stanton stated he viewed Roger Maris' single season home run record as the "legitimate" one because Maguire and Bonds were juicing, completely oblivious to the fact that his own home runs were getting a similar boost.

 

They changed the ball without telling anyone to the point where MGL and a couple other guys had to go on eBay to buy authenticated baseballs from certain time periods, run tests, and determine that the balls were different while MLB denied it. I've been saying this has been tainting the game for awhile, and is just another example of Rob Manfred being a terrible commissioner.

[Beans]

It made me laugh when Giancarlo Stanton stated he viewed Roger Maris' single season home run record as the "legitimate" one because Maguire and Bonds were juicing, completely oblivious to the fact that his own home runs were getting a similar boost.

 

They changed the ball without telling anyone to the point where MGL and a couple other guys had to go on eBay to buy authenticated baseballs from certain time periods, run tests, and determine that the balls were different while MLB denied it. I've been saying this has been tainting the game for awhile, and is just another example of Rob Manfred being a terrible commissioner.

It definitely has tainted the game.

 

I read an interesting piece in The Ringer last month on this: "The more we learn about the ball's uncertainty ... the more we have to confront the fact that so many of the stories we've grown up with and cheered for and cherished are more unreliable than we want to believe."

 

Not just melodramatic twaddle:

 

On some level, of course, baseball fans know that context drives performance, results, and records. In 1961, for instance—the very same year that literary critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term “unreliable narrator” in The Rhetoric of Fiction—Roger Maris benefitted from expansion (he homered 13 times against the two new American League clubs) and an increased schedule length (the AL added eight games to reach 162) to set the new single-season home run record.
 
This season, Pete Alonso set a rookie record with 53 home runs, which might merit some sort of ball-related asterisk—except he broke the previous mark of 52 set by Aaron Judge in the juiced ball season of 2017, which itself broke the previous mark of 49 set by Mark McGwire in the “rabbit ball” season of 1987.
 
As these examples indicate, the ball has driven extreme outcomes before, dating all the way back to the 1910 season, if not earlier. Sometimes the changes were unintentional, the result of either mistakes or outside forces; home runs jumped in 1977, for instance, when the league switched from Spalding to Rawlings as the ball manufacturer. In 1918, home run totals dropped in the second half because the United States’ entrance to World War I precipitated a shortage of baseball-building materials. “The balls, now wound with inferior yarn and covered with lower quality horsehide, were even deader than before,” writes Glenn Stout in The Selling of the Babe.

 

The baseball has been lying to us.

[Beans]

"If the 2019 postseason ball is representative of on-field production going forward, there is no guarantee that the 2020 ball will be any more predictable. And we may discover next season that 'random is the new normal,'" writes Dr. Meredith Wills, one of the data scientists who investigated the ball's composition, per The Athletic https://theathletic.com/1356835/2019/11/13/the-search-for-answers-about-the-2019-postseason-baseball/