SAN DIEGO -- Chris Young played basketball at Princeton, pitched for 13 seasons in the major leagues and is the son-in-law of Dick Patrick, the president of the NHL's Washington Capitals. So Young knows plenty about athleticism and how elite athletes adapt to changes in their environment. Home run rates in baseball have spiked, he believes, because hitters recognize that the current generation of balls seem engineered to soar.
"These are highly refined and skilled athletes who have incredible abilities to make adjustments on a daily basis," Young, now a vice president for Major League Baseball, said at a news conference at the winter meetings Wednesday. "Certainly they adjust to the circumstances and the conditions of the equipment."
Young was speaking as a member of an eight-person committee that conducted another league-commissioned study on the properties of several years of curiously lively baseballs. The panel included four university professors, two MLB officials and two top executives for Rawlings, which has manufactured balls since 1977 and is now effectively owned by the league.
Major league hitters set a record for home runs last season with 6,776 -- a staggering 2,590 more than they hit in 2014. The surge began in the second half of 2015, fueling an era of unprecedented power: four of the top five home-run rates in major league history have come in the last five seasons.
The other was in 2000, before the league tested for steroids. But if chemists are passing out miracle slugging pills in clubhouses now, nobody has caught on. Many pitchers insist that the ball feels different in their hands, and Justin Verlander -- perhaps the game's most accomplished active pitcher -- accused the league in July of intentionally spring-loading its namesake product.
"We have never been asked to juice or dejuice a baseball, and we've never done anything of the sort, never would on our own," Michael Zlaket, the president and chief executive of Rawlings, insisted on Wednesday. "There's always going to be some inconsistency in the product. It's created by the fact that it's natural materials, and the production process has a lot of manual steps."
Baseball has no desire to change the materials or adopt a synthetic ball, which theoretically would behave more predictably. Keeping a hand-stitched baseball with all-natural materials is a romantic and deeply held principle within the league's central office.
"My personal opinion?" said Morgan Sword, the league's senior vice president for economics and operations. "It's the most beautiful piece of sports equipment on earth."
Part of that beauty, to MLB, is the unknowable. What if warmer weather is shedding harsher sunlight on cows, drying their skin and affecting the leather for the balls? What about a mosquito outbreak in cow pastures?
Sword mentioned those factors, perhaps only half-seriously, as things the league could not really measure. But the panel emphasized that it is using all available technology, including Statcast data, to find explanations for the supercharged baseball.
Part of the answer, said Alan Nathan, a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is that tighter seams have decreased drag on the baseball. But that is just a slice of the reason.
"Only about 35% of it," Nathan said, adding that the change in seam height amounted to a fraction of the thickness of a regular piece of paper. "Now, factors other than seam height account for the remaining 65% of the variation in drag, and unfortunately, we have not yet been able to identify these factors, despite lots of effort."
The league pledged Wednesday to continue studying the issue and monitoring storage conditions, techniques for rubbing mud and so on. But the overriding message was simple: deal with it, folks, because the league is not changing the baseball.
"I think the Rawlings baseball is part of the charm of the game," Commissioner Rob Manfred said, "and we are committed to that baseball."
Sports on 12/12/2019