BLAST OF FF
THE REASONS BEHIND BASEBALL’S HISTORIC HR SURGE
CHICAGO — Don’t forget to blame Atlanta.
Or, if you dig baseball being more homer-happy than ever, then by all means credit Georgia’s capital city and its national pastime inhabitants, the Braves, who closed down forgettable Turner Field last fall and just opened SunTrust Park, which has proven considerably more welcoming to the long ball.
In 40 games this year, SunTrust has seen 92 homers, an average of 2.3 per contest. In 2016, Turner Field featured 130 round-trippers in 80 games, 1.63 per contest.
If you’ve been watching the Yankees and Mets play, however, you know that data point only scratches the surface of baseball’s power party. Through Monday’s action, the sport had registered 2,892 home runs, or 2.54 per game, putting it on a pace to shatter the record of 5,693 (2.34 per game) established in 2000. Last year’s total of 5,610, 2.31 per game, ranks as the second-highest count, per the Elias Sports Bureau.
The Atlanta ballpark turnover warrants mention because it exists as the only tangible external factor — the logic doesn’t hold up when you try to incorporate climate change, strike zone or anything else — beyond the three fundamental components behind a home run. The trio of rational explanations for why we’re seeing scoreboards light up like never before:
The ball, the bat and the players.
1. THE BALL
Let’s start with the item that’s getting the most attention, perhaps deservedly so.
“I saw the seams are lowered, and the ball has more resiliency. More bounce to it,” said Yankees pitching coach Larry Rothschild, who has been in professional baseball for more than 40 years. “I’m sure that plays into it. Both of those things. Because with lower seams, it’s harder to execute all of the pitches.”
Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander told The Detroit Free Press: “I think the old eye test is the best thing to go by. Guys that have been around this game for a long time, you see balls leaving the yard that otherwise shouldn’t. Whether it’s juiced or not, I don’t know.”
Mitchel Lichtman thinks he knows, or at least that we should be suspicious. A respected baseball analyst and researcher who has consulted for several major league teams — he created the metric for defense called Ultimate Zone Rating — Lichtman recently conducted a study of 36 baseballs, comparing 17 from 2014 and the first half of 2015 (which he purchased on eBay) with 19 from the second half of 2015 and 2016. He published his results on the website The Ringer with coauthor Ben Lindbergh.
“I found in my testing the [more recent] balls were a little bit more bouncy,” said Lichtman, who cited a measurement called coefficient of restitution. He added: “The different coefficient of restitution would affect the exit velocity coming off the bat.”
The endeavor also determined that the seams on the ball had lowered, which, as per an NCAA-sponsored study, makes a flyball travel farther.
In a statement, Major League Baseball said, “As a quality control effort, we routinely conduct in-season and offseason testing of baseballs in conjunction with our consultants at UMass-Lowell to ensure that they meet our specifications. All recent test results have been within the specifications. In addition, we used a third-party consultant to test whether the baseball had any impact on offense in recent years, and he found no evidence of that.”
Lichtman countered that the range of specifications is so broad — the COR can vary from .514 to .578 — that it’s a moot point to cite it at all. A study by the Baseball Research Center, written in 2000, asserted, “Two base- balls could meet MLB specifications for construction but one ball could be theoretically hit 49.1 feet further.”
“I have no idea whether MLB intentionally did this for this current surge. If I had to guess, I would say no,” Lichtman said in a telephone interview. “But it is a little bit coincidental that [commissioner] Rob Manfred has been talking since he became commissioner that run-scoring got so low, ‘ We might even juice the ball’ to look for ways to increase run scoring, given the way they were supposed to talk about doing something, there’s some evidence they might have done it on purpose.”
In January 2015, FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal reported that MLB sent a memo to the Players Association floating a number of ideas to improve offense. Among them, according to the report: “Wrapping the ball tighter to make it fly farther.”
Last week, Manfred told Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports: “I understand that people like conspiracy theories. I wish that I were a) smart enough or b) effective enough to, in the middle of the season, figure out a way to effectuate this sort of change. I would be way better at my job if I were smart enough to pull that off. I understand there is a change that is difficult to explain.
“The other side of that coin is that to hypothesize that we somehow had a plan that we implemented in the middle of the season that effectuated that sort of change strains credulity.”
Just to add further murkiness to this mystery, Yankees veteran pitcher CC Sabathia said, “I don’t think so” when asked if the ball seemed livelier. As for the seams, “I’ve noticed higher seams,” he said.
2. THE BAT
Welcome to the calmest, least controversial portion of this deep dive into going deep. This couldn’t be simpler: Capitalism runs on the notion that you’re constantly trying to improve your product. Baseball bats fall in line with that notion.
“From our standpoint, the production of the bat, so much more goes into it now than ever before,” said Pete Tucci, the founder of Tucci Bats, which supplies bats to more than 150 major league players. “Just scientific standpoints of the wood that’s used. Why
the grain makes the bat stronger. What grain to actually look at.
“For years, with ash and then maple, maple wasn’t being manufactured in the correct way. Maple was being manufactured in the same way ash was being manufactured. There are subtle differences in the wood that you kind of have to treat each a little bit differently.”
Tucci, a first-round selection of the Blue Jays in the 1996 amateur draft — injuries prevented him from reaching the big leagues — said a process called wood compression has helped significantly.
“It used to be that you wanted to hit the bat as much as possible in batting practice so the wood was indented as it could be,” Tucci said in a telephone interview. “We’re taking that process out of it by compressing the wood beforehand so that, from the very first time you’re taking the bat, it’s as hard as it can be.”
In his day, Tucci said, players didn’t have anywhere near the access to scientific and analytical data that they do now.
“Guys are now able to learn the swing faster and better than ever through video technology and a lot of the technologies that have hit the market in recent years that now is scientific proof as to why you swing a certain way. Launch angle. Swing path and all that kind of stuff,” Tucci said. “For years, the swing has been taught by a feeling. If there are 30 hitting coaches around the league, you had 30 different ways to swing the bat.”
Thanks to major league homer leader Aaron Judge most of all, launch angle has joined exit velocity as the en vogue measures. MLB.com’s Statcast system utilizes those to determine the distance of homers that travel beyond its radar. Launch angle is, as MLB.com describes it, “the vertical angle at which the ball leaves a player’s bat after being struck.” Judge’s 495-foot Yankee Stadium blast against the Orioles on June 11 registered a launch angle of 28.4 degrees. That represents a line drive-ish fly ball, precisely the kind of shot that will travel healthily.
“I just think that’s the approach of more guys,” Yankees third baseman Chase Headley said. “That’s what organizations are cultivating. That’s what they’re preaching. It’s what they’re teaching: ‘Just get the ball in the air.’”
“Those two things — bats being better than ever and players now understanding the swing better than ever, from a scientific standpoint — are leading to this increase in production,” Tucci said.
3. THE PLAYERS
As Tucci referenced, the players’ evolved approach to hitting goes hand-in-hand with their improved equipment. Also aligned with those initiatives: Improved players, in terms of fitness, conditioning and preparation.
“Baseball players keep getting better,” Headley said. “They’re bigger. They’re faster. They’re stronger. The training, the research, that stuff is all a lot more specific. Efficiency of movement has increased because of that.”
“Guys are bigger and stronger,” Sabathia agreed. “You’ve got more velocity. It doesn’t take much to get it out now. I think that’s got something to do with it.”
In line with that increased strength on both sides, baseball players are striking out at a record pace, too, with 18,770 through Monday. Baseball has set a strikeout mark each of the prior nine seasons, according to Elias.
And what fun would it be if we didn’t touch on the other facet of players’ performances, the one that many associated with dark chapters of baseball’s past?
“I believe absolutely they’re still using,” Anthony Bosch said in a telephone interview. “Anybody who believes differently, it doesn’t make sense.
“Remember something: It’s part of the game. Like it, don’t like it, disagree with it, but this stuff, whatever they use, whatever they’re on, whatever they seek and administer, this gives you the edge.”
Bosch founded the Biogenesis Clinic in South Florida and wound up bringing down several high-profile players, most notably Alex Rodriguez, when he agreed to cooperate with MLB regarding his distribution of illegal performance-enhancing drugs to these players. He beat baseball’s drug-testing system at a time when then-commissioner Bud Selig repeatedly boasted the game had put the issue behind it.
Released from prison this year — as part of his deal with MLB, league officials vouched for him to the federal government — Bosch said he keeps an eye on baseball, though he stressed he no longer works with players or does anything in the illegal PED universe.
“The testing is a little bit upgraded due to the whole Biogenesis thing,” he said. “I applaud baseball for stepping up. But it’s not where it needs to be.”
A generation before Bosch shook up the game, Victor Conte did so, recruiting Barry Bonds and many others to sign up for his BALCO clinic and drug protocols. Conte agreed that avenues to defeating the tests remain, with micro-dosing of the drugs serving as one possibility.
“If you micro-dose and use on a daily basis a small amount, as opposed to a larger amount once a week, then it’s possible to circumvent that test,” Conte said in a telephone interview.
Last year, while meeting with the Baseball Writers Association of America, Manfred said, “We have the most advanced, best testing technology in the world. That’s what we use when we test our players.”
Nevertheless, he acknowledged as recently as April, during a news conference in Pittsburgh, “I doubt we will ever get to the point where any sport can say with 100 percent certainty no athlete is using a performance-enhancing drug.”
“I think it’s going well. I think the testing is going as good as it can go. Guys are getting caught,” Sabathia said. “Obviously, you’re not going to catch everybody. But you’re trying.”
Said Headley: “Certainly I’m not saying that it’s out of the game. I’m sure there’s some of it going on. But the testing the way it is, and the amount of players hitting the home runs that they are, I can’t imagine that that’s a factor. I’m not by any means naïve enough to think that it’s completely gone, but I don’t think that’s impacting the number of home runs.”
To find the reasoning behind the homer orgy is to embrace uncertainty. Short of an epic smoking gun, there’s no logical way to break down, by cause, why we’re seeing what we’re seeing.
Instead, we have to park at the most reasonable conclusion: What we’re seeing, what’s happening, has something to do with the ball, something with the bat and something with the players.
And, a tiny bit, Atlanta.