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Baseball’s ongoing inability to understand what its own fan base wants is both remarkable and mortifyingly instructive. Either the people who run the sport cannot fathom normal humans, or these humans keep changing their minds about what seems important to them when it comes to their sport of choice.
I’m banking on the former. If there’s anything I’ve learned in decades of writing about baseball, it’s that MLB’s ruling class is largely composed of sports lunkheads. (Definition: People who are wildly successful at something else, and assume that such success will easily translate into the business of owning a sports franchise. It uniformly does not translate, whereupon these people often become either defiant, angry, sullen or defensive, plus greedy in every case.)
Don’t get me wrong; fans can be fickle. But it’d be somewhat easier to crack this code if Baseball, capital B, were not constantly whipsawing these fans back and forth between extremes with something as basic as the ball itself.
I mention all this because we are in the midst of a new problem: the ball is dead. It’s just dead, dead, dead. Here is one example: Balls that are barreled by major league hitters so far in 2022 are traveling, on average, six feet shorter than they carried just one season ago, and nearly 10 feet shorter than two seasons ago.
If you look at the above video of the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger absolutely crushing a pitch from the Giants’ John Brebbia, you’ll see a very vivid example of what happens when you factor in the six feet. Let me put it this way: Brebbia watched it leave Bellinger’s bat, then turned back around and asked the umpire for a new ball. Instead, it was easily caught. That thing simply expired mid-flight.
It’s early in the season, and hitters have suffered through some horrible weather. (Not so much L.A., obviously.) Still, let’s look at the numbers: Teams are averaging 0.90 homers per game so far. Last year, the overall figure was 1.22 per team per game. In 2019, when HR records fell left and right, it was 1.39.
So yes, MLB has doctored the baseballs again, this time to deaden them — an overreaction to what happened over the past couple of years, when homers were easy and people complained. I should say “allegedly complained,” since I can’t really name too many people who were that offended by watching more home runs. Let’s assume there were some.
In theory, this new approach, the dead ball, is meant to steer the game away from the three-true-outcomes approach to hitting that has taken hold in MLB. (The three: strikeout, home run, walk.) Reducing batters’ ability to drive balls over fences, it is thought, will bring about a return to a line-drive, contact-oriented style of hitting, which equates to more action per inning.
It’s a fine theory, but it suffers from a couple of problems. First, MLB juiced its baseballs once upon a time for a very good reason: Fans clearly enjoyed seeing home runs sail. The industry encouraged this move toward power hitting even as it strayed fully into ignoring PED overuse, and even then it took years for that change to fully take root. In the same way, it’ll take years to undo, if that’s actually what MLB wants.
Second, encouraging contact over power moves the industry directly into a conversation about defensive shifts. If you want guys to put more balls in play, but high-level analytics have fielders placed in precise positions to defend such contact, you’ve defeated your own purpose.
Do we really want MLB to start legislating defensive positioning? I’ve resisted that idea largely because I don’t trust the sport’s brain trust to get it right. Then again, one of the other options is to watch the industry zig-zag annually between baseballs that are manufactured to reduce drag and balls that are made to die in the air.
There’s a fascinating report at CBS Sports that goes into heavy detail on all this, if you’re so inclined. It’s where some of the numbers I’ve referenced here come from, and it includes such tidbits as the difference between air-drying and machine-drying new baseballs and what happens when you run out of stock and have to dip into previous batches of baseballs (spoiler: not good).
But the bigger question is what constitutes action. Listen, MLB’s owners can’t really shorten games, no matter how much they bleat about it. They’ve built their sports fortunes on selling every minute of ad space that clogs and drags out those between-innings breaks, and as long as that formula holds, it’s nearly impossible to really, truly make games go faster.
All they can do, then, is try to give fans what they want. I feel fairly certain that folks are not clamoring for fewer home runs, for less power. Is there a sweet spot in which both power and contact are rewarded? There has to be — but no one in charge seems capable of finding it at MLB’s baseball production facility in Costa Rica. The search continues.