With the Astros scandal enveloping baseball all offseason like a boa constrictor, sucking the life out of it and leaving nothing but a trash can-shaped husk in its wake, it was easy to forget about the scandal that was on people’s minds during the year: namely, what the hell was up with the ball?
Major League Baseball swore up and down throughout 2019 that the ball was measurably the same one they’d been using for a long time, but anyone watching the games could see that it wasn’t. The ball jumped off bats like it never had. Balls that should have been shallow pop flies left the stadium. Pitchers’ souls left their bodies at unprecedented rates. The whole season was a madcap dingerfest, and no one from the league office would even acknowledge it as it was happening.
A report in The Athletic pointed to smoother leather and lower seams as the reason, while MLB’s post-season report insisted that, while 60% of the rise in home runs was due to a decrease in drag (lower seams were a factor, but MLB’s study was unable to identify any other factors), the other 40% came about because hitters were swinging to optimize launch angles.
In any case, the effects were noticeable, and not just in the majors. Since both AAA leagues used the MLB ball last year, the players there had a unique perspective on just how different the new ball was from the old one.
“Especially with these new baseballs, the ball flies more,” Shaun Anderson told me back in May (all quotes are from 2019). But he took those lemons, made lemon cakes, and served them to Sansa Stark. “Honestly, you're gonna have the inflated numbers, but you learn how to pitch and you learn how to throw the ball down and you learn how to focus on getting a groundball and not getting those long pop flies that can go out. Just keeping the ball down in the zone. These new balls help you do that.”
Sam Selman was ready with the numbers without even being prompted. “They’ve certainly added more home runs. It’s also the PCL, so the ball flies here pretty good as well … I think there was 424 home runs in April of last year, and then there are 909 this year.”
But like Anderson, Selman turned an unpleasant fact about his job being harder than it was a year earlier into a discussion of what he had to do to respond. “Keep the ball down is the biggest strategy,” he said. “Guys are trying to hit more balls out of the park, which is good and bad because I’m able to throw my slider in there and they try to hit it out of the park, and try to mix it in for more strikeouts, but if you leave it up, it’s gonna get out quicker.”
Of everyone I talked to about the new ball, Zach Green was the most measured. “I would say there’s a difference,” he said, before pointing out that, “It’s not like we’re using bouncy balls. You still have to square it up. You might get a couple more homers over the fence this year than previously.”
Green noted that because the PCL has so many parks at altitude, it’s harder to tell whether his additional homers were a result of the ball or the live parks, and that hitting in the International League would be a better test.
So when I talked to Jaylin Davis, who jumped from AA to AAA with the Twins (that is, a league that used the old ball to a league that used the new ball), winding up in Rochester of the IL before coming to Sacramento of the PCL, I got his thoughts too. “You can definitely notice the difference here. 100%,” he said immediately.
And then, specifically about his time in the International League: “You can definitely tell. Especially coming from AA and going up there, some of the [homers] you hit, you’re like, this is probably not getting out.”
We don’t have any way to tell what ball will show up this year, especially considering the 2019 postseason ball was, other than one small postseason sticker, identical to the regular season one and it played like the normal pre-2019 baseball. But if the ball keeps noticeably jumping even by the standards of the homer-happy PCL, it won’t be hard to tell what’s going on.