National Post (National Edition)

MLB has been confused by its baseballs for some time now

- SCOTT STINSON Postmedia News sstinson@postmedia.com

On Monday night it was Chris Taylor's turn to express befuddleme­nt. The L.A. Dodgers utility player had smoked a fastball in the sixth inning and watched as it barely cleared the fence for a home run.

“That's all I got,” Taylor said, explaining that he was surprised the baseball didn't even make the seats despite his having flushed it. “The balls are doing weird things this year.”

Indeed they are. On any given day in this young season, hitters and pitchers find themselves baffled by the behaviour of the sphere that gives the sport its name. The ball is dead. The ball is slippery. Except for sometimes when it is neither of those things.

The players certainly have noticed. Chris Bassitt of the New York Mets rang alarm bells two weeks ago: “They're all different,” he said. “The first inning they're decent. The third inning they're bad. The fourth inning they're OK. The fifth inning they're bad.” His general summary of the state of things with the ball: “Bad.”

Toronto's Alek Manoah has described the balls as “terrible,” with visible inconsiste­ncies around the seams from ball to ball. His teammate Yimi Garcia called the balls “embarrassi­ng” after one recent outing.

Players have reported certain balls as soft or squishy, others have said they can have unexpected flat spots.

The results are obvious. The home run rate has dropped by about 20 per cent this season from last year, even while controllin­g for factors such as the weather. Balls with the exact same exit velocity and launch angle aren't flying as far as they did a year ago, and sometimes those difference­s are even observed in the same game this season. By some estimates of batted-ball data, the home-run rate in 2022 is closer to a third lower than expected.

This is, or at least should be, some sort of crisis for Major League Baseball. Fundamenta­lly changing the equipment of a sport is about as extreme an alteration as the stewards of a game can make, especially when, as is the case here, no one seems to know exactly what has happened. MLB, of course, says everything is fine.

It is important to understand here that MLB has been confused by the properties of its balls for some time now. The home-run rate jumped by more than 20 per cent in the 2019 season, at which point commission­er Rob Manfred blamed the manufactur­ing process and said the change to the ball was inadverten­t. (Pitchers suspected the ball had been juiced intentiona­lly, because homers are fun.)

By last season, the ball's carry had been dialed back to pre-2019 levels, but a number of older balls were still in use, meaning both the lively one and the dead one could be in play from game to game. (MLB had denied using different balls until independen­t reporting determined that product codes on balls showed they had been made in earlier years.)

This season, Manfred again insists that the balls have been uniformly made according to the 2021 specificat­ions, which makes their unusual behaviour even more strange. One explanatio­n could be the introducti­on of humidors at all MLB parks this season. Baseballs are stored in them to ensure that they are not too dry — and, thus, springy — when put in play.

Or, at least, that was the idea. Scientists, who understand these things better than a sports writer, have explained that if a humidor was supposed to keep baseballs from becoming too dry during the hot summer months, it's possible that they are making them too soft during the cool spring. The humidor treatment might also be raising the seams of the balls, by effectivel­y puffing up the wool, which would reduce their aerodynami­c carry properties. More bluntly, whatever they did to deaden the ball for the 2021 season might be exacerbate­d by the humidors in 2022. The balls went from correctly dead last year to too dead this year, which is not intended to be a Monty Python reference.

None of that explains the in-game consistenc­ies. Some players have theorized that the league wants the nondead ball used in nationally televised prime-time games. Some have wondered if older balls — or even newer balls that have long since been out of the humidor — find their way into game play. Others have suggested that something about the new ball makes high-spin pitches more dead off the bat than in previous years. One grand conspiracy theory posits that MLB is trying to push the sport away from the home run/strikeout trends of recent years by quietly introducin­g a ball that simply doesn't fly as far.

If players discover they can't mash the ball 450 feet, maybe they start trying to knock opposite-field singles, and suddenly more balls are in play, just like the good old times. So the theory goes.

This would be lunacy. How could the league make a change that would devalue power hitters and boost slap hitters without being transparen­t about it? Could they possibly be that, for lack of a better word, sneaky?

We are left to ponder such things because the league has offered no other explanatio­n for why its balls have stopped carrying as far.

It could be that as the weather changes, normal ball flight will resume and the nightly clips of confused hitters and pitchers will recede. But if the only thing that will restore expected batted-ball behaviour to the baseball season is warmer weather, that doesn't say much about the prospects for the playoffs.

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 ?? JULIO AGUILAR / GETTY IMAGES ?? Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Alek Manoah notes visible
inconsiste­ncies around the seams, from ball to ball.
JULIO AGUILAR / GETTY IMAGES Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Alek Manoah notes visible inconsiste­ncies around the seams, from ball to ball.

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