As we noted over the weekend, Major League Baseball saw its single-month home run record fall in June, shattering a 17-year-old mark. As we’ve noted elsewhere recently, there were two studies released in the month of June which strongly suggest that the reason for the significant spike in home runs since the middle of the 2015 season was due to alterations in the construction of the baseball. The ball, to put it colloquially, is “juiced,” with lower seams leading to less air resistance, allowing it to fly farther.
Major League Baseball took issue with this notion over the weekend by sending a memo to clubs ostensibly refuting the idea of juiced balls, but actually not really refuting anything at all. In fact, it was downright disingenuous. Bob Nightengale wrote about it at USA Today. You can see a photo of the actual memo here. The upshot:
“The baseball in use today tests well within the established guidelines on every key performance metric. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the composition of the ball has changed in any way that would lead to a meaningful impact on on-field play.”
Except . . . the memo compares the balls used now, in 2017, vs. the balls used in 2016. Which is beside the point, as we’re seeing the same home run spike now that we saw in 2016. The studies conducted by Mitchel Lichtman, Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur, in contrast, compare the balls used before the middle of 2015 — when the home run rate spiked immediately and dramatically — and the balls used since. Those studies show a significant difference. In light of that, MLB’s study, if you can even call it that, is an Orwellian P.R. document. It’s practically an attempted con job.
For his part, one of the men who discovered the changes in the ball replied to me on Twitter yesterday, responding to MLB’s so-called study. Mitchel Lichtman: