Baseball America – July 02, 2019

42 JULY 2019 • BASEBALLAMERICA.COM

ANALYSIS

BALLS OVER

THE WALL

Seemingly minor tweaks to

the baseball are causing major

changes in numerous leagues

by J.J. COOPER

F

or decades, the baseball’s effect

on the game was one of the great

conspiracy theories that baseball

fans loved to debate. There was

plenty of discussion but little data.

There was the weird home run blip

in 1987, when home runs were hit in

bunches only to go back to “normal” in

1988. But for years, any rumored tweaks
      to the baseball were treated much in the
      same way as corked bats, stolen signs
      and spitballs in the nebulous world of
      speculation.
      In 2019, we no longer are left to spec-
      ulate as to whether a tweak to the base-
      ball makes a major impact on the game,
      The data is there and we have multiple
      examples of leagues deliberately or acci-
      dentally modifying their game simply by
      changing the baseball.
      If a league wants more home runs, it
      can simply lower the seams on the ball
      (reducing the drag, which allows the ball
      to carry farther) or adjust to a livelier
      core of the baseball. If a league wants to
      tone down offenses, it can reverse the
      process or even make the baseball a little
      bigger.
      Major League Baseball has not publicly
      requested or made any changes to its
      baseball, though multiple studies by The
      Ringer, FiveThirtyEight and Dr. Meredith
      Willis have found changes that, while
      staying within the parameters of a legal
      MLB ball, appear in recent years to have
      made the ball slightly smaller and tight-
      er, which produces less drag. At the same
      time, home runs have gone through the
      roof—or at least over the fence—at pro-
      digious rates in the majors and minors.
      But while Major and Minor League
      Baseball have not come out and said
      they’ve changed the ball, they are prov-
      ing to be an exception. Instead of hiding
      what they’ve done, other leagues have
      publicly acknowledged the equipment
      changes they have made. All around var-
      ious leagues we’re seeing how tweaking

the ball can lead to massive changes to

game.

In the first half of this decade, college

baseball had a problem. After bat stan-

dards were tweaked to make metal bats

more comparable to wooden bats, home

runs disappeared from the college game.

In 2013, UCLA won the national title

while hitting 19 home runs as a team.

Pat Valaika (five home runs) and Kevin

Kramer (three) were the only two Bruins

hitters with more than two home runs.

In the 14 games of that College World

Series, only three home runs were hit.

So the NCAA tweaked the ball. They

lowered the seams to match the seams

used on the minor league ball, which was

also was produced by Rawlings. Reducing

the drag helped the ball carry more. An

NCAA-sponsored study found that such a

change could add 20 feet to a well-struck

ball. Home runs went from one every

86 at-bats in 2014 (the last year of the

old ball) to one every 61 at-bats in 2015,

an increase of 41 percent in one season.

Since then, the NCAA has generally been

happy with the level of offense.