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
- 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.