As home run rates skyrocket, pitchers must adjust
SAN DIEGO — Chris Young played basketball at Princeton, pitched for 13 seasons in the major leagues and is the son-inlaw of Dick Patrick, the president of the Washington Capitals. So he knows plenty about athleticism and how elite athletes adapt to changes in their environment. Home run rates in baseball have spiked, he believes, because hitters recognize that the current generation of balls seem engineered to soar.
“These are highly refined and skilled athletes who have incredible abilities to make adjustments on a daily basis,” Young, now a vice president for Major League Baseball, said at a news conference at the winter meetings on Wednesday. “Certainly they adjust to the circumstances and the conditions of the equipment.”
Young was speaking as a member of an eight-person committee that conducted another league-commissioned study on the properties of several years of curiously lively baseballs. The panel included four university professors, two MLB officials and two top executives for Rawlings, which has manufactured balls since 1977 and now is effectively owned by MLB.
Major league hitters set a record for home runs last season with 6,776 — a staggering 2,590 more than they hit in 2014. The surge began in the second half of 2015, fueling an era of unprecedented power: four of the top five home-run rates in major league history have come in the last five seasons.
The other was in 2000, before the league tested for steroids. But if chemists are passing out miracle slugging pills in clubhouses now, nobody has caught on. Many pitchers insist that the ball feels different, and Justin Verlander accused the league last July of intentionally springloading its namesake product.
“We have never been asked to juice or dejuice a baseball, and we’ve never done anything of the sort, never would on our own,” Michael Zlaket, the president and chief executive of Rawlings, said on Wednesday. “There’s always going to be some inconsistency in the product. It’s created by the fact that it’s natural materials, and the production process has a lot of manual steps.”
Baseball has no desire to change the materials or adopt a synthetic ball, which theoretically would behave more predictably. Keeping a hand-stitched baseball with all-natural materials is a romantic and deeply held principle within league’s office.
Part of that beauty, to MLB, is the unknowable. What if warmer weather is shedding harsher sunlight on cows, drying their skin and affecting the leather for the balls? What about a mosquito outbreak in cow pastures?
The panel emphasized that it is using all available technology, including Statcast data, to find explanations for the baseball.
Part of the answer, said Alan Nathan, a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is that tighter seams have decreased drag on the baseball.
To break it down even further, Nathan said the changes in drag accounted for only 60 percent of the increase in homers. The other 40 percent, he said, were “changes in launch conditions” — that is, essentially, players swinging for the fences.
According to Fangraphs, fly ball rates reached 35.7 percent last season, the highest point since 2011. Players also pulled 40.7 percent of their hits, the highest rate in 14 years, and had a hard-hit rate of 38 percent, the highest since the website began tracking the statistic in 2002.
Pitchers are also throwing a higher percentage of sliders, curveballs and change-ups than they have in more than a decade — while forcing hitters to respect fastballs that hummed in at a record average of 93.1 mph.
In other words, the extraordinary feat of hitting a pitched baseball is harder than ever — and with less drag on the baseballs, hitters really try to make their contact count. These are the modern ground rules, and pitchers have no choice but to use the ball they get.
“On any given night my job was to be better than the opposing pitcher,” Young said. “Ultimately, if you’re both pitching with the same baseballs and playing with the same baseballs, then you have to be better, and that’s what our sport is about, and that’s your responsibility.”
The league pledged this week to continue studying the issue and monitoring storage conditions, techniques for rubbing mud and so on. But the overriding message was simple: Deal with it, folks, because the league is not changing the baseball.