Jun 14, 2017  The Juiced Ball Is Back. It’s true that a juiced/flat-seamed baseball could encourage a 'swing-for-the fences' approach that results in more strikeouts and fewer balls in play. Apr 24, 2019  the case against a juiced baseball Point number one is talent, pure and simple. When I stratify balls in play by exit speed and launch angle, my top fly ball 'bucket' is 105 MPH and up.

If you've been following along with Major League Baseball this season, -. A combination of changes, including reduced seams and a more-centered 'pill,' have made the ball more aerodynamic - capable of carrying further and at higher speeds than past iterations.

There is, sadly, no other ship like it (decent warship, 170+ extra crew, 400+ tons of cargo space. If Heat goes up quickly, you desperately need more cooling.And, this sounds stupid, but you really need the Bactrian. Hai outfits are great (if expensive, but you can earn a lot of money there). It's the grown-up version of a mule).And optimize the outfits for your fleet. Especially the engines - not as good as the Atomic Engines from the Deep, but almost as good and considerately smaller/lighter.Even if you have to sell your hard earned fleet now to get the Bactrian, there will be enough Falcons, Bastions, Leviathans to capture. Endless sky timeline.

Hence the league-wide home-run barrage that is threatening seemingly every record on the books.For the most part, pitchers have remained quiet on the matter. That changed Monday, when ace used the All-Star Game to air his grievances with and the new baseball. Here's part of what Verlander said, per:'It's a f-ing joke,' said Verlander, an eight-time All-Star who is starting his second All-Star Game on Tuesday. 'Major League Baseball's turning this game into a joke. They own Rawlings, and you've got Manfred up here saying it might be the way they center the pill. They own the f-ing company. If any other $40 billion company bought out a $400 million company and the product changed dramatically, it's not a guess as to what happened.

We all know what happened. Manfred the first time he came in, what'd he say? He said we want more offense. All of a sudden he comes in, the balls are juiced? It's not coincidence. We're not idiots.' Verlander, in Tuesday's All-Star Game, made some other valid points, noting MLB has always juiced the balls for the Home Run Derby - so what's stopping them from doing the same thing all season long?The regular-season numbers resemble what would happen if the Home Run Derby balls were used all year long.

Over the course of the first half, teams homered 1.37 times per game; the record high entering this season was 1.26 times per game, set in 2017. Add in what's happening at the Triple-A level, and it's clear what's going on. Obviously this isn't the first time MLB has faced these accusations. Rather, the charge seems to pop up every 10 or so years, like clockwork. There was the, and now this. (Japan had its own juiced ball scandal a few years ago - )Writing off Verlander as a crank or a kook would be unwise. There's ample evidence suggesting the ball is different in a way that's more conducive to offense: be it the statistics referenced above; various independent studies; or commissioner Rob Manfred's recent concession.The question isn't whether the ball is juiced - or, even, if it was juiced intentionally, really.

The question is how MLB intends to fix the problem - presuming, that is, MLB sees the home-run numbers as a problem in the first place.

Illustration by Kelsey DakeMaybe it was the hit by unknown outfielder Adam Duvall. Maybe it was when Giancarlo Stanton Chris Berman say “,” or when Bartolo Colon broke into a around the bases. But at some point this season, you’ve probably noticed: We haven’t just gone back to those of — we’ve surpassed them.In 2016, the typical major league plate appearance is more likely to result in a homer than. And this onslaught happened quickly: Home runs on contact—the rate at which non-strikeout at-bats produce dingers — is up 35 percent compared with 2014, which has helped drive a scoring increase of 0.41 runs per team, per game.Naturally, many fans are wondering why. (The rest have already decided it’s steroids.) And while we can’t quite settle the speculation, we can offer the strongest statistical evidence yet that it isn’t because of the batters, or the pitchers, or the ballparks, or even performance-enhancing drugs. Instead, the numbers suggest the ball itself is to blame.

The research so farJust before Opening Day, we the unprecedented uptick in the home run rate we’d observed in the second half of last season, which held up into the playoffs and spring training. We found that the increase was much too large to have happened by chance, and we also discovered that the rise in home run rate coincided with a significant increase in batted ball speed, which (as physicist Alan Nathan later ) was sufficient to explain the extra homers. But that led to a new, equally perplexing question: Why were balls being hit harder?We knew there was to the strike zone, and we even adjusted for warmer weather, an and (yes, it was terrible in 2015 too). We still found that than they “should” have been based on previous performance, and that roughly 30 percent more home runs had been hit than expected.That left the baseball.

So we bought a dozen official “Bud Selig”-branded balls from 2014 and a dozen “Rob Manfred”-branded balls from the second half of 2015, and we sent them to the Sports Science Laboratory at Washington State University. There, they were fired from a high-speed air cannon at a steel plate so that their — basically, their bounciness — could be measured precisely. But “” didn’t catch on: while the tests did detect a small increase in bounciness, variation between individual balls was so high that the overall change wasn’t statistically significant.We couldn’t confirm the juiced-ball hypothesis, but we also couldn’t dismiss it. We weren’t testing game balls, and one batch wasn’t a large enough sample to be certain that the balls hadn’t changed. And although some readers responded to our article by proposing performance-enhancing drugs as a possible culprit, that explanation didn’t seem consistent with a sudden, dramatic mid-season change. To believe that PEDs are responsible, one would also have to believe that during the 2015 All-Star break, the whole league decided in unison to start taking a powerful, undetectable substance that helped only hitters. That seems like a stretch.

Everyone has a hypothesisBut the dingers keep coming for hitters of all ages, and the league keeps insisting that the ball hasn’t changed, so players and analysts keep coming up with ideas — most of which were summarized by Tyler Kepner in The New York Times.As those theories proposed, maybe teams are so obsessed with velocity that they’ve neglected command and secondary stuff in developing pitchers, making them easier to take deep. Maybe hitters have learned to time harder fastballs, or focused on hitting fly balls to avoid, or decided to stop worrying about making contact and start swinging for the fences, or realized at putting them away with two strikes and learned to in earlier counts.

Or maybe, as Commissioner Manfred last week, teams have gotten smarter about batting better hitters high in the lineup, leading to more plate appearances for power guys.Many of these conjectures don’t stand up to the evidence. To be clear, a juiced ball wouldn’t be an inherently bad thing. In fact, if the ball is juiced, the sport might be better off because of it.

It’s for hitters to make contact, so if the contact they do make were having a smaller effect, scoring could really be stuck in the doldrums. That said, it would still be nice to know when there’s a change in something as fundamental to baseball as, well, the baseball.But although our results are suggestive, they’re not conclusive. To make a more compelling case, we’d need to conduct additional lab tests and start doing dissections, although those might also leave us looking for answers. (We’re unlikely to slice open a baseball and.) According to one hitter we spoke to, who’s played in both the majors and Triple-A since the homer explosion started, the juiced-ball theory “seems to make sense and there is no doubt in my mind that there is a difference in the balls between Triple-A and the majors.

I just wouldn’t want to get so tunnel vision about the balls that we could be missing a bigger issue.”He’s right to reserve judgment; one thing we’ve learned from this mystery is that even when armed with big data, we can’t declare every case closed. But the deeper we dig into baseball’s record home run rate, the harder it is to believe that it doesn’t have something to do with the ball.