Manfred says that baseballs are not juiced

Faced with a record onslaught of home runs that has convinced many pitchers that baseballs are juiced, Commissioner Rob Manfred said the sport has been unable to find any changes in the manufacturing process.

A May 2018 report to Major League Baseball by professors specializing in physics, mechanical engineering, statistics and mathematics concluded there was less drag on the ball, causing more home runs. MLB still has not figured out why, and Manfred denied accusations by AL all-star starter Justin Verlander and other pitchers that baseballs deliberately had been altered.

“Baseball has done nothing, given no direction for an alteration in the baseball,” Manfred told the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on Tuesday. “The biggest flaw in that logic is that baseball somehow wants more home runs. If you sat in an owner’s meeting and listened to people talk about the way our game is being played, that is not the sentiment among the owners for whom I work. There is no desire on the part of ownership to increase the number of home runs in the game. To the contrary, they’re concerned about how many we have.”

Batters have hit 3,691 homers in 1,345 games, on pace for 6,668 over the full season. That would be 19% above last year’s 5,558 and 9% over the record 6,105 hit in 2017 that topped the Steroids Era high mark of 5,693 in 2000.

“Pitchers have raised issues about particularly the tackiness and the seams on the baseball, and we do believe that those could be issues that are related to the performance of the ball and we’re trying to get our hands around,” Manfred said.

Union head Tony Clark, a former all-star first baseman, said some of his members have sent balls to the players’ association office.

“The ball suddenly changed and I don’t know why,” Clark said.

The balls have become baseball’s hot topic, especially among players who handle them the most.

“I’d probably say the ball feels a little different,” said Chicago White Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito, who leads the major leagues with 11 wins.

Teams to decide on netting: Extending protective netting down foul lines is a ballpark-to-ballpark decision because of differing configurations, according to Manfred.

Following a series of foul balls that injured fans, Major League Baseball mandated ahead of the 2018 season that netting extend to the far end of each dugout.

“We recognized early in this process that it was very difficult to set an individual rule, one rule that applied to 30 different ballparks given their structural differences, and instead we have opted to work with the individual clubs over a period of time to extend netting,” Manfred said.

“We’ve made extensive progress on that and I believe that that progress will continue, and I think one of the reasons that we have had progress is that we have not put clubs in an impossible position by adopting a one size fits all rule.”

Manfred said changes during the midst of a season are hard to put in place.