Juiced-ball debate looms as GMs gather

Watching from afar, Diamondbacks lefty Robbie Ray noticed something different about the baseballs in play during the postseason last month. For six months, the majors experienced a home run explosion. In October, Ray noticed, the opposite was true.

“They went back to the old baseballs,” Ray said. “It looked like it, anyways.”

The numbers support what Ray thought he saw, and the difference between the way the balls flew during the regular season with how they behaved in the postseason makes for a confusing juxtaposition as the offseason gets underway.

As baseball’s general managers arrived in town on Monday for their annual meetings – they are being held this week at a resort in Paradise Valley – a question seemed to loom over the sport: What baseballs will be in play in 2020, the ones from the regular season or those in use during the playoffs?

“I do think that’s a fair and real question,” said a high-ranking executive with an American League team. “And I don’t know.”

“It is easily the biggest question of the offseason,” a prominent player agent said.

Baseball didn’t just set a record this past year for single-season home runs – it obliterated it, setting a new mark with 2 1/2 weeks left in the season. Ten players hit at least 40 homers, 58 hit at least 30 homers and a whopping 129 players hit 20 or more. In 2014, one player launched 40, 11 players reached 30 and 57 players hit 20.

The uptick left little doubt that something had changed with the composition of the ball. Even Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged as much when he said that while there were no major changes to the way the ball was manufactured the pill at the ball’s core could be more accurately centered, thus allowing it to fly with less resistance.

However, something strange happened in October. The ball stopped carrying. Two weeks into the playoffs, Baseball Prospectus’ Rob Arthur detailed how his statistical model indicated that home runs were down roughly 50 percent.

“The more aerodynamic it is, the further it’s going to fly for a given exit velocity,” Arthur said. “What happened was, the baseball became a lot less aerodynamic. It’s hard to say why this is, but we have enough data to be absolutely sure that it happened.”

Arthur said there often are fluctuations in how the baseballs perform from month to month in a season, but he said change from September to October was the most drastic on record. During the World Series, Manfred denied the idea that anything had changed.

“I can tell you one thing for absolutely certain: Just like every other year, the balls that were used in this postseason were selected from lots that were used during the regular season,” he said, according to the “There was no difference.”

With baseball’s offseason beginning in earnest with the GM meetings, the affair begs a question: How are clubs supposed to determine what versions of players they are acquiring if they don’t know what version of the ball will be in play?

Arthur, for one, sees a potentially tricky situation, one he said “absolutely should” be a consideration as teams make decisions.

“I’ve been surprised in conversations I’ve had with front office people how little attention they seem to be paying to the baseball and the changes that have occurred,” Arthur said. “But it definitely makes a difference in how you evaluate a player.”

After a game in September, Ray, frustrated by a home run he thought was the product of a so-called juiced ball, sounded off to reporters, saying he wants to see more transparency from the league. He repeated that desire in an interview last week, particularly after watching fly balls he thought would have been home runs in the playoffs die short of the warning track.

“I just feel like being honest with us, being honest, telling us what you’re doing to the baseball, your reasoning behind it, and players will accept it,” Ray said.

An MLB spokesman said the ball is among the topics to be covered by the GMs in formal meetings this week.