#juiced balls

Are MLB baseballs “juiced”? If so, how are they impacting the current game? Numerous high-profile pitchers like Justin Verlander of the Houston Astros, David Price of the Boston Red Sox, and Zach Britton of the New York Yankees  believe this to be the case and the league needs to resolve it. 

When this topic is brought up to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, he is quick to shoot down any notion of this conspiracy being remotely true. The issue for Commissioner Manfred and Major League Baseball is that the statistics and scientific research done on baseballs show there is an issue with the current baseballs that are being used. As we near the end of the 2019 MLB season, the previous record for single-season home runs was broken on September 11th when Oakland Athletics shortstop Marcus Semien hit the 6,106th home run of the season. As the final day of regular season for baseball comes to a close on Sunday, the total sits at 6,685 home runs. This league-wide epidemic can be seen as 4 different teams have broken the 2018 New York Yankees home run record of 268. This season alone, the New York Yankees hit 305, the Minnesota Twins hit 303, the Houston Astros hit 283, and the Los Angeles Dodgers hit 277. The bottom of the league is also breaking records as in 2019, only 6 teams will not reach the 200 home run mark, a number that was at 19 teams for the 2018 season. In just the months of March and April of this season, there was a 12% increase in the number of home runs compared to this same timeframe during the 2018 MLB season.

These numbers cannot be simply seen as a one year outlier. The fact that 4 teams each has broken the previous record should be an indicator to Commissioner Manfred that there is an issue with the current baseballs being used. Yes, players are getting stronger - pitchers throw faster and batters can hit the ball harder and farther than ever before. The players are still able to reach farther distances and higher exit velocities regardless of whether a pitcher throws a fastball or an off-speed pitch which shows that velocity and strength does not have a direct effect on every home run hit.

Aside from the numbers, there have been multiple scientific studies done to conduct research on this topic of “juiced baseballs”. Numerous scientists have conducted tests from studying the exterior features of a baseball to performing CT scans and X-rays to see if there are interior differences in the densities of various baseballs over the years. Dr. Meng Law of the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine used a CT scan to determine whether the density of the baseball used in the MLB changed, and he found substantial differences. Dr. Law was able to isolate the density difference in the core of the ball between a MLB baseball from the 2014 season and one from the 2016 season. The baseball from 2016 was 40% less dense compared to the 2014 baseball. There are similar changes when it comes to the exterior of the baseball as the seams are smaller. This reduces the air drag on the baseball as it tries to reach its maximum exit velocity and distance. These changes allow for a baseball to move quicker and bounce harder off of the bat, which are two major factors for hitting home runs.

Justin Verlander dice que las pelotas de Grandes Ligas están inyectadas

Justin Verlander finalmente dijo lo que muchos de nosotros hemos pensando. El lanzador de los Astros y jugador seleccionado a este Juego de Estrellas, dijo estar convencido que el aumento constante de jonrones en el béisbol no es el resultado de una pelota más aerodinámica, sino que es el resultado de una bola que ha sido fabricada de manera diferente para producir muchísima mas ofensiva.  

“Est…

Before the onslaught of performance enhancing things, cheating used to be so much more fun. Because of baseball's hard line stance against these performance enhancing things, we are forced to look at long standing folksy forms of cheating in a new light.

Two of the more famous (and fun) folksy forms of cheating (corking and the juiced ball) are profiled in an article at Smithsonian.com. Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois, elaborates:

"There was some anecdotal information from players that there’s something like a ‘trampoline effect’ when the ball bounces off a corked bat," says Nathan, one of the authors of the new study. So the researchers hollowed out a bat, stuffed it with bits of cork and fired a ball at the bat from a cannon. If anything, the ball came off the corked bat with a slower speed than off a normal bat. Less velocity means a shorter hit. Their conclusion: the trampoline effect was bogus.

This is not really a new assertion, but the research is fun (for lack of a more inspiring word). There has always been a sort of stigma with the corked bat, but the vitriol came with a wink and a nod. The player in question was just doing what he needed to do to help his team win. After similarly rigorous testing, Nathan came to much the same conclusion with regard to the idea of the juiced ball:

To test the speculation that something had changed with the balls, the researchers compared the bounciness of balls from 2004 with a box of unused balls from 1976 to 1980. They shot the balls at a steel plate or a wooden bat at 60, 90, and 120 miles per hour and measured their bounciness after a collision—what physicists call the coefficient of restitution.

The result? "There was no evidence that there was any difference in the coefficient of restitution of the different balls," says Nathan.

The research, while far from perfect, tells us what we sort of already knew: these things really don't matter much. In reality, bumps and dumps in offensive production are generally the combination of a myriad of different elements: cleaner, better treated baseballs in the twenties and thirties, the trickle (and subsequent pour) of an entire subset once banned from competition, strength, diet, varying interpretations of the strike zone, amphetamines, Lasik, performance enhancing things, Tommy John, the raised mound, the ionic titanium necklace... some things can be measured, while others are mere feathers in trunks used to give rest, build confidence, or place blame when things happen that we don't really understand.

All I know is that there was a time in little league when we decided to put the corked bat theory to the test. I went down to the local Thrifty Drug Store with two friends. The season was in full swing. We had a roll of quarters. I remember buying an ice cream while one of my friends pumped the quarters into a machine that held several dozen brightly colored bouncy balls.

We left with our pockets full. My friend's younger brother launched one of the balls across a busy street. We ran and screamed things at him. We swore a car stopped. It freaked us out. The ball bounced and ricocheted with reckless abandon. When we got back to my house, we began breaking the bouncy balls up with a hammer and a screwdriver. We took the chunks and filled the hollow inside of an old Easton. The bat was silver with green writing. I still have it. We bring it to bachelor parties and use it as a chalice.