Majors’ great ball mystery continues

League’s expert panel stumped

Baseballs really have been getting extra lift since 2015 and it’s not from the exaggerated uppercuts batters are taking, according to a 10-person committee of researchers hired by the commissioner’s office.

“The aerodynamic properties of the ball have changed, allowing it to carry farther,” said committee chairman Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But the panel, which includes professors specializing in physics, mechanical engineering, statistics and mathematics, struck out trying to pinpoint the cause.

The committee’s 84-page report was released Thursday by Major League Baseball. There was no evidence of meaningful change in the bounciness of the balls, formally called coefficient of restitution, or alteration in batters’ swings, such as uppercutting.

As for what caused the change in aerodynamic properties, it remains baseball’s great mystery.

“We have to admit and we do admit that we do not understand it. We know the primary cause is the change in the drag, but we just simply cannot pinpoint what feature of the ball would lead to it,” Nathan said during a conference call ahead of the report’s release. “Therefore it was probably something very, very subtle in the manufacturing process, but again it has to be pretty subtle because if it weren’t, we would have found it.”

The major-league average of home runs per game climbed from 1.9 before the 2015 all-star break to 2.17 in the second half, then rose to 2.31 in 2016 and a record 2.51 last season. The percentage of batted balls resulting in home runs rose from 3.2 per cent in 2014 to 3.8 per cent in 2015 to 4.4 per cent in 2016 and 4.8 per cent in 2017.

“We found a consistent picture that the drag coefficient is a little bit smaller as we progressed through 2015 into ’16, into ’17,” physicist Leonard Nathan said. “Finally, we used our physics expertise to conclude that the small change we found in the average drag coefficient going throughout the period 2015 to 2017 was completely consistent with the change in the number of home runs per batted ball.”

MLB announced five steps in response to the report:

Monitor temperature

■

and humidity of ball storage areas this year and work with the committee to determine whether to mandate humidors throughout the league in 2019;

Update production specifications

■ with Rawlings and add specs for aerodynamic properties;

Develop aerodynamic

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tests;

Create standards for mud

■

rubbing, to be enforced by the umpires;

Form a scientific advisory

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council.