MLB: Panel says baseballs get extra lift, but don’t know why

NEW YORK— Baseballs really have been getting extra lift since 2015, and it’s not from the exaggerated uppercuts batters are taking, according to a 10person 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 phys- ics, 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 (COR), or alteration in batters’ swings, such as uppercutting.

As for what caused of the change in aerodynamic properties, it remains baseball’s great mystery, the sport’s equivalent of the search for the Loch Ness Monster.

“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 Wednesday ahead of the report’s release. “Therefore it was probably is 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.”

Physicist Leonard Mlodinow, in an executive summary accompanying the report, spec- ulated “manufacturing advances that result in a more spherically symmetric ball could have the unintended side effect of reducing the ball’s drag.”

The major league average of home runs per game for both teams combined climbed from 1.90 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 last season.

“Rawlings makes baseballs with a much, much, much tighter spec than they are required to do by the actual spec itself,” Nathan said.

“So we recommended altering that and tightening up the spec, and so that when you say the ball is within spec, it has some meaning to it, and they followed that recommendation.”

Application of the Lena Blackburne Original Baseball Rubbing Mud, which comes from the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, was not examined. The mud is used by clubhouse attendants to make the balls less slippery.