Baseballs really have been getting extra lift since 2015, and it is not from the exaggerated uppercuts that batters are taking, a 10-person committee of researchers hired by the MLB commissioner’s office found.
“The aerodynamic properties of the ball have changed, allowing it to carry farther,” said committee chairman Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
However, the panel, which includes professors specializing in physics, mechanical engineering, statistics and mathematics, struck out trying to pinpoint the cause.
Photo: AP
The committee’s 84-page report was released on Thursday.
There was no evidence of meaningful change in the bounciness of the balls or alteration in batters’ swings, such as uppercutting.
What caused of the change in aerodynamic properties remains baseball’s great mystery.
“We have to admit and we do admit that we do not understand it. We know the primary cause is the change in the drag, but we just simply cannot pinpoint what feature of the ball would lead to it,” Nathan said during a conference call on Wednesday. “Therefore, it was probably something very, very subtle in the manufacturing process.”
Physicist Leonard Mlodinow, in an executive summary accompanying the report, speculated that “manufacturing advances that result in a more spherically symmetric ball could have the unintended side effect of reducing the ball’s drag.”
The MLB average of home runs per game for both teams combined climbed from 1.9 before the 2015 All-Star break to 2.17 in the second half, then rose to 2.31 in 2016 and a record 2.51 last season. The percentage of batted balls resulting in home runs rose from 3.2 percent in 2014, to 3.8 percent in 2015, to 4.4 percent in 2016 and 4.8 percent last year.
The committee inspected the Rawlings factory that manufactures the balls in Turrialba, Costa Rica, and analyzed test data from 2010 to last year compiled by Rawlings and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
The group tested 180 unused balls from 2013 to last year, and 264 game-used balls from 2012 to last year.
Application of the Lena Blackburne Original Baseball Rubbing Mud was not examined. The mud is used by clubhouse attendants to make the balls less slippery.
“There could be some non-uniformity there,” Nathan said. “One of the things that is known to affect the flight of the ball, the carry of the ball, is the roughness of the surface of the ball. That’s why the seams matter, but also the leather part, the white part matters, too, and differences in how that mud is applied could possibly provide a clue to it,” Nathan said.
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