SAN DIEGO _ For a sport that is once injected, twice shy and prone to be suspicious of the physical reasons for any dramatic swell in power, a study released Wednesday by Major League Baseball suggests another reason for all the homers happening in bulk.
This time, it's physics.
An analysis of baseballs from the 2019 regular season and its postseason revealed, according to committee members, that a cause for the spike in homers was due to a change in the baseball's drag and "a change in player behavior." The 27-page study found seams on the baseball were lower, allowing the baseballs to be more aerodynamic and, thus, travel farther.
"Fast forward to 2019, where, again, home runs are way up," said Dr. Alan Nathan, a professor of physic emeritus at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as he introduced the findings Tuesday at the winter meetings. "We started by posing three questions for ourselves. ... What are the underlying causes of the changes in home run rates during the 2018 and '19 seasons? Particularly, how do they break up between the changes in launch conditions and changes in the carry _ that thing that's affected by the drag on the ball? What are the physical properties of the baseball that lead to both a large ball-to-ball variation and the smaller year-to-year variation in the drag properties?"
The studies done to answer the questions revealed that about 60% of the increase in homers was due to the decrease in drag, Nathan said. The other 40% came from the alterations hitters have made to embrace launch angle and seek exit velocity as the traits du jour of hitting in the majors.
"Changes," Nathan said, "in batter behavior."
Although locally the Cardinals didn't enjoy the same goose to their offense, the 2019 was a homer heyday for the majors. A total of 6,776 home runs were hit during the regular season _ an upswing of 11% from the previous record-setting summer of 2017.
The nature of the ball and the increased power numbers dominated the conversation at the All-Star Game with pitchers like Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer openly insisting that Major League Baseball owed the players an explanation for the change in the baseball's behavior. The lack of power in the postseason then prompted a new round of concerns, question, and even skepticism. Cardinals manager Mike Shildt said that their internal studies of ball behavior during October had hard-hit balls traveling 3{ feet less, on average.
At midseason, Scherzer called the baseball "the elephant in the room," and union chief Tony Clark told reporters in Cleveland how "the ball suddenly changed, and I don't know why."
The study insists now they do.
"What I've taken from this and learned from these four (scientists) is that we choose to use a piece of equipment in our game that is made of natural materials and hand-stitched, and that introduces a lot of variability into that piece of equipment that wouldn't exist if it was fully synthetic or something that was made with less human involvement," said Morgan Sword, the league's senior vice president of economics and operations. "I think one of the things we're going to have to do as we continue this journey of discovery is accept the fact that the baseball is going to vary and the performance of the baseball is going to vary, and we're going to do everything we can to control it. But that is kind of fundamental to the equipment choice we've made."
The baseballs are manufactured by St. Louis-based sporting goods company Rawlings, which has been the official baseball provider for the majors for four decades. After being hand-sewn at the Rawlings facility in Costa Rica, the baseballs are transported to Missouri and stored at a warehouse near Washington, Mo. That is the depot from which all of the major-league baseballs are delivered. The conditions of that warehouse are the same ones duplicated by the humidor at Coors Field and in Arizona in order to achieve some continuity when it comes to humidity. The baseballs the Cardinals and Reds used in Monterrey, Mexico, just like the baseballs the Yankees and Red Sox used in London, were imported from Missouri shortly before those series to avoid any changes to the baseball by those new environments.
And, yet, the study showed a perceptible variation in the baseball's condition from previous years to this year. The seam height on the baseball dropped from about 0.035 inches from 2013 to 2015 to 0.0305 this past season. This change would alter the carry on the baseball.
"There's always going to be some inconsistency in the product," said Michael Zlaket, president of Rawlings. "It's created by the fact that it's natural materials and the production process has a lot of manual steps. But I'm confident that we have always done it, and we will always do it better than anybody else in the world. ... What the scientists concluded (is) there are many factors that play in here. I think that's what's been borne out by the study as much as anything. The ball has some natural variation. The game has some natural variation, and there's just many contributing factors to it."
Commissioner Rob Manfred said that he is not "and would not be" in favor of changing to a synthetic baseball.
"The Rawlings baseball that we use is part of the charm of the game," he said. "There's one ball out there at a time, and they're both using the same one."
The study does conclude with suggestions to narrow the variation between baseballs, to better track the batches of baseballs, and to further explore other reasons for the balls to behave differently. That would include how the mud used to rub up the baseballs or the variety of ways the baseballs are rubbed with mud would contribute to the variations.
But, in the end, those variations could be as much the nature of the ball as hitters altering their swings or pitchers inventing new pitches are the nature of baseball.
"I can speak personally to that and say that on any given night my job was to be better than the opposing pitcher," said former big-league starter Chris Young, who now works in the commissioner's office and was part of the report's presentation. "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."
