The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Ball issues a concern for players
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.
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 like 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. Major League Baseball, 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.
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 sportswriter 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.
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.