Baseball Has a Baseball Problem.

It just can't fix it

Thanks for being here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, do it today! You’ll find a button below.

---

The overlords of Major League Baseball recently acknowledged a problem that they say definitively exists, is statistically provable, and cannot be repaired. This is one of those “you’ll get nothing and like it moments,” which always sounds a little odd when it emanates from the halls of power of a roughly $12 billion industry.

Still, there you go: The baseballs that MLB is using this season are dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Home runs are dying on the warning track.

Line drives headed for the gap are dropping for sharp singles.

Hitters look on in amazement as their best shots fall short.

It all sucks.

MLB knows it.

You’ll get nothing and like it. (As foreshadowed above.)

---

This came to light thanks to research done by The Athletic into batted-ball data that MLB makes publicly available. Looking at the information, the sports site’s reporters found that there has been more drag placed on the baseballs in flight this season than any before, going back to when MLB started tracking the data about a decade ago.

In short, a hard-hit fly ball is coming up about 4 feet short of its expected distance. That means a likely wall-ball is instead caught by an outfielder retreating to the warning track, and a likely home run is instead speared at about the fence.

It’s not imaginary, nor some toddling around of the numbers. League officials confirmed The Athletic’s findings, all the way down to the 4-foot calculation — and why wouldn’t they, when they made the information public in the first place? — but offered no specific explanation.

That is, no explanation beyond the obvious: The MLB’s in-game supply of baseballs emanates from a single factory in Costa Rica, a Rawlings facility, Rawlings being a company in which MLB holds primary ownership. These baseballs are hand-stitched by actual humanoids. The human factor can contribute “variance,” which is one of MLB’s favorite words to throw out there when it’s got nothing else to offer.

So this season, the Costa Rican factory workers are suddenly stitching the baseballs with slightly higher or wider seams, which then increase the drag coefficient on the balls once they’re launched airborne?

Well…yeah.

I mean, maybe. Could be. Nobody seems to know. Did anybody ask them?

---

---

We’ve had baseball-production discussions before, usually when there were suspicions that MLB was juicing the ball in order to increase offense in the game. That is one chapter of an endless quest, in that pitching has forever and always run ahead of hitting in this sport. It’s just incredibly difficult to strike a baseball well and solidly when it is being thrown by a full-time, best-in-the-universe, master-of-the-dark-arts expert at pitching deception. This truth is unchanging.

Over the decades, MLB has employed a number of tactics to keep offense in the game. These include lowering the pitcher’s mound, making the designated hitter part of one and then both leagues, altering the strike zone, slapping a timer on pitchers, banning exaggerated defensive shifts, and looking the other way for as long as possible when players use performance enhancers or teams cook up elaborate sign-stealing schemes. Next year will feature the addition of an automated appeal system designed to defeat catchers who frame pitches to sneak extra strikes that aren’t really strikes.

Nothing works forever. Naturally, then, nobody is entirely thrilled to learn that “variance” in the human production of baseballs may have led to this season’s drag on their flight.

MLB can’t say with certainty that raised or widened seams is the reason, because the league doesn’t know. By its own admission, it’s just guessing. On the other hand, the baseballs used in the minor leagues, which are manufactured in a Rawlings factory in China, are not documenting similar issues.

But if human variance is indeed the culprit, this season has proved remarkably consistent in that variance. At 28 of MLB’s 30 parks (that is, all of them except the minor-league setups in Tampa and West Sacramento), home runs as a percentage of all fly balls hit were at a near-decade low in March, in April and again in May. The Athletic found only four days this season in which there wasn’t more drag placed on baseballs than last year’s average.

---

The folks at the league office say nothing else has changed. They took control of Rawlings years ago, installed humidors in every MLB park, and altered the inner core of the baseballs in order to get a more predictable (slightly bouncier) performance from them, and it worked for several years — until 2025.

The league also maintains that offensive production is actually very similar this season to the same period in 2024, at least in terms of raw numbers: home runs, batting average, etc. But based on improved exit velocities by MLB hitters, the offensive numbers should be going up, not holding steady.

There are certainly a few factors that MLB cannot fully investigate, including the effects of climate change on air density in their ballparks. The results, though, aren’t really in question. They’re not good.

When a Mets fan named Ben posted video of a Juan Soto smash being caught near the wall and suggested MLB baseballs are dead, Pittsburgh veteran Andrew McCutchen replied on social media that he’d been told by a league rep that, yes, the seams are indeed higher this year, and baseballs aren’t traveling as far.

“When I asked if there is something that can be done about correcting the current performance of this year’s baseball, I was told there was nothing that can be done about it this season,” McCutchen wrote. “But they are ‘working hard on getting to the bottom of why the seams are higher.’ So yea, you’re not wrong Ben.”

Tremendous! Perhaps hitters can use McCutchen’s post when they take their deflated offensive numbers into arbitration.