Where Did the Homers Go?
On Monday, I examined the new baseball’s impact on April home run totals. In sum, home runs were down in April 2021 compared to April 2019, with the home run per batted ball rate dropping by roughly 0.45 percentage points, a figure that would result in about an 8% decrease in home runs from ’19 to ’21, under the assumption that hitters receive roughly equal plate appearances in each season. (Due to seven-inning doubleheaders and the new extra inning rules, though, that won’t happen, but it’s still good to compare apples-to-apples to estimate the impact.)
After sharing the article on Twitter, I received an interesting question that I felt merited further discussion: How many of those now-non-homers turn into hits versus outs? That is a fascinating question because it potentially gets to the heart of why MLB dejuiced the baseballs in the first place. Baseball didn’t want to eliminate offense, per se; they just wanted to alter how it is generated, with more balls put into play rather than what they perceived as a recent over-reliance on the long ball. In short, if all of those newly-created non-homers are now other types of hits, then dejuicing the baseball might’ve actually had the impact MLB wanted. If they are now outs, then it’s just going to make life that much harder for batters.
Given the majors’ historically-low batting average this season — once again, I’ll point you to Brendan Gawlowski’s excellent piece on the matter — you can likely guess what happened: Outs are up.
Just to make the data familiar again, here’s the heatmap that compares the probability of hitting a home run based on launch angle and exit velocity bins that I created. This shows, for example, that when hitters hit fly balls with a 100-104 mph exit velocity and at a 20-24 degree launch angle, they were rewarded with a home run at a rate that was 34 points higher in 2019 than ’21:
This group — the 100-104 mph EV, 20-24 degree LA — is the area where I want to first draw your attention. Within this subset of the data, I evaluated the distribution of outcomes for hitters in both 2019 and ’21. While these distributions are wholly dependent on where I set the bounds of the bins — meaning that, if you set your bins differently, the distributions would look different as well — a comparison remains useful. Since we’re maintaining consistency across the two different seasons, we can underscore the importance of the changes. So while an individual season’s distribution is quite dependent on the bins, the comparison is less so.
With that out of the way, here’s the distribution of outcomes for these types of batted balls in 2021:
And now here’s the distribution of outcomes in 2019:
That is a rather stark change. While a home run was the most common event for these types of batted balls in 2019 by far, it’s the third-most common this season. It’s good that we’re still seeing a base hit — doubles — leading the way here, but the real story is the “field out” group. In 2019, fly balls hit between 100-104 mph and at a 20-24 degree launch angle went for outs (including sac flies) just 18% of the time; using the inverse, hitters would reach base 82% of the time when they’d connect. In 2021, however, hitters are reaching base just 65% of the time. That’s still a solid figure, but it provides further evidence that, rather than convert home runs into other types of base hits, MLB has only reduced offense overall. That’s not a shocking conclusion, but at least it is consistent.
I looked at the three other groups with at least a 15-point decrease in home run probability, and the outcomes were practically identical. In every case, the new ball is not creating more hits. Here is what those reach base probabilities look like:
| EV | LA | HR Prob Change | Reach Base, 2019 | Reach Base, 2021 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 95-99 | 20-24 | -0.20 | 51.8% | 20.0% | -0.318 |
| 100-104 | 20-24 | -0.34 | 81.8% | 65.3% | -0.165 |
| 100-104 | 25-29 | -0.22 | 84.8% | 70.7% | -0.141 |
| 105-109 | 20-24 | -0.18 | 100.0% | 94.8% | -0.052 |
Unsurprisingly, in all of the bins most affected by the new baseball, we’re witnessing an associated decline in the overall probability the batter will reach base. We know how good defensives have become; if more balls are staying in the yard, it was always extraordinarily unlikely that they’ll be going for hits at the same rates. But to see a 32-point decline, as in the example of the 95-99 mph exit velocity, 20-24 degree launch angle bin, is striking. Batters were more often than not reaching base on those types of batted balls in April 2019. In April 2021, they only reached base one in five times.
More generally, you’ll notice once again that most of the affected batted balls are those below 30 degrees in launch angle. This makes sense, considering this type of contact — lower-hit fly balls — would be most impacted by an increase in drag when hitting a home run is a binary, “Did it go over the wall?” question. (Meaning that, even if higher-hit baseballs aren’t going as far, they’re just not going as many rows back into the seats.) To get a larger sample for our distributions, we can compare all fly balls below 30 degrees, irrespective of exit velocity, and have more than 1,000 batted balls to analyze.
Here’s 2021:
And now 2019:
The effect is the same. Home runs are down, outs are up. Batters reached base on 54% of fly balls hit at a launch angle below 30 degrees in April 2021, down 11 points compared to April 2019, when they reached base 65% of the time.
Ultimately, the proof is right here: de-juicing the baseball, even if it was slight, likely did not have the impact that MLB was expecting. If baseball’s higher-ups are interested in more singles, doubles and triples, changing the baseball (at least so far) has not proved helpful in that regard. All we’ve seen is an overall decrease in offense; when strikeouts are increasing at the rate that they are, and defense is as good as it is, limiting hitters’ main tool to counteract excellent pitching probably only will serve to backfire overall. While balls are still flying over the fence quite frequently, the decrease in offense is likely here to stay under these new conditions.
Devan Fink is a Contributor at FanGraphs. You can follow him on Twitter @DevanFink.
Maybe it’s time for the three outcome approach to die instead of banging their heads against the wall? Slap some hits against the shift
Yes. I want to see home runs go down and baserunners go up. keep run scoring down, but action on the bases up.
It will naturally, as in all things (Shoot, the Babe was a 3 true outcomes, so it goes in cycles, no?). Baseball is a game of constant adjustments. The shift is partially taking care of that, and i feel the shift is worse for the game than 3 true outcomes, as it takes away from the spirit of the game. SS shouldn’t be allowed to cross second base, and vice versa, imho. But hitters will adjust to it, same as always.
Shifts have been a part of the game nearly as long as the game has existed. It’s just that shifts have gotten much more frequent and extreme the last several years.
I agree this is the desired outcome for fans and MLB, but is it realistic? Or to think of it another way, is it smart for players to make that adjustment? Even assuming hitters can choose to trade power for contact, would that actually produce more runs? Home runs are good, after all – even with a slightly decreased chance of hitting one, it might still be optimal for hitters to sell out for power.
I’d like to see another follow-up that examines some batted-ball distributions and figures out the point where fewer home runs but more contact becomes a net positive. My guess is that we’re not there yet, but I’d like to see the numbers.
This is completely separate from what makes an entertaining baseball game. A game with many balls in play and baserunners but few runs scored is probably more fun to watch than a game with lots of strikeouts and walks with a few home runs mixed in, even if the second game has more runs scored. But you win by scoring more runs, not by being fun to watch.
I’d say even if hittters actively traded power for contact they wouldn’t be able to change much. The TTO is partially because pitching has advanced faster than hitting, at least in my opinion.
^this. If it were easier to hit the other way each time, they’d obviously be doing that. In what universe are we better at deciding what is easier for ballplayers to do than ballplayers? I don’t think that’s an anti-analytic position–we can *agree* hitting against the shift is a great idea–but so is hitting a HR in every AB. Doesn’t make it a practical solution, especially against pitching that is overpowered compared to hitting.
“pitching has advanced faster than hitting”
I see this sentiment repeated quite often, but I honestly don’t know what people mean by that.
Yes, pitchers are throwing faster than ever.
Yes, pitchers are getting strikeouts at higher rate than ever.
But aren’t hitters also smashing the ball harder than ever?
The goal of the offense is to score runs, not to maximize batting average.
Among the 100 seasons between 1921-2020,
2019 had the 8th highest ERA and 2020 had 13th highest ERA.
That does not sound like evidence that pitching has advanced faster than hitting.
Unless you are suggesting a secret covert operative team of hitters sabotaged the Rawlings baseball manufacturing process, ERAs increasing was mostly not because of the hitters the past few years. MLB trying to dial back the ball a little shows that the ERA increases was not the hitters.
See this is why I think shrinking the zone has to go along with deadening the ball. Give hitters a smaller area to defend and we’ll see more balls in play, offsetting the increased outs on fly balls by increasing the number of chances to get someone on base.
Will shrinking the zone help hitters handle velocity? All I see now is desperate hitters flailing wildly at heat thrown right down the middle. The size of the zone won’t make any difference if the hitters can’t handle heat. Shrinking the zone will certainly increase the number of BB’s, especially if electronic balls and strikes helps the hitter know that a pitch 4 inches out of the zone or bouncing on the plate isn’t going to be called a strike, but that will lead to more BB’s and longer games, which, after I watched all of yesterday’s 4:13 embarrassing fiasco between the Red Sox and Tigers, is not in the best interest of the game.
Shrinking the zone will just result in more walks.
Maybe. But is it easier to get batters to adjust to hit balls at the top of the zone, or is it easier to get pitchers to adjust by aiming at other parts of the zone? I would think it is the latter, but it’s certainly up for debate.
The size of the zone has changed a number of times in baseball’s history and you’ll see that the walk rate does not change much because pitchers are able to adjust (sometimes takes a year or two). The main number you can change with the size of the strike zone is strikeouts.
This is not the end of the world – more baserunners will change the equation for the succeeding batters, and ups the value of singles in relation to home runs. Right now, making home runs harder to hit doesn’t alter batter behavior because scratching runs out is too difficult. More baserunners will change that.
I’m not really a fan of deadening the ball further, although I’m undecided about whether it makes sense to switch back to what we had before. In general, messing with the ball (as we can see here) is probably the worst move because even when it does exactly what you want it to you’re worse off than you were before (again, as we see here).
But I think that it’s become pretty clear that pitches at the top of the zone are in a place where batters are placed in a no-win situation, where you get to pick between a called strike and a swinging strike. I think “shrinking the zone” might not be exactly the way to fix that, but rather “shrinking the zone at the top” does it.
Hitters adjusted before by going to uppercut swings. They can adjust again to high heat.
Regarding strike zone, perhaps one solution is to change to robo umps. I have heard it said more than once that it would benefit the hitter. Based only on my own eyes this season, it looks like there are way more pitches outside the square strike zone being called strikes by umpires, than pitches inside the zone being called balls. Anyone else feel like that too?
I think the fundamental issue is the shifts. More than half of hitters seem to favor one part of the field. As others have pointed out, the deadening of balls then took away the recent strategy of swinging for homeruns. Others have argued that pitching just got way better, but I don’t see that happening in one season. Again, every team is shifting aggressively now, and then they deadened the ball.
Deadening the ball was a good start. The next is to lower (not move) the mound.
Seconding this.
Harder to hit a homer = less incentive to swing for the fences.
Lowering mound = fewer strikeouts.
Combined, that’s more balls in play, more defensive plays, more hits, more baserunning, more action.
Chicks dig the long ball combo’d with guys throwing 100 mph for 1 inning or less. Maybe shrink bullpens? Less “openers?” They’re already limiting how many guys can pitch an inning, and that’s great.
Home runs were more exciting when they weren’t so common. Same with how many pitchers throw 95+ now with wiffle ball movement thanks to the raised seams. It’s not as entertaining when it seems like everyone is doing it.
Well, then we’ll get a whole lot of wild pitches and walks, plus a ton of pitching injuries. Eventually, pitchers will re-learn how to pitch (and this re-learning will occur across multiple levels of baseball, although the timing of it will depend on how it is adopted) but the interim period will be awful. Might be worth it in the long-term, but in the short term…yuck.
Except, as Joe Sheehan pointed out, lowering the mound was probably not responsible for the offensive increase we commonly think of. First, 1968 (69?) was an outlier – by 1971/72, the offense had returned to nearly what it was in the early 60s, modulo some pitching talent dilution caused by expansion.
I think the *issue* was that there were too many home runs. Remember when everything was leaving the yard? This change solved that! But also shows a blatant misunderstanding of what the actually problem is — contact.
Chana, I made ten comments on Brendan Gawlowski’s article and they all focused on the subject you correctly focused on. Without contact there is no consistent action. A game of catch between Jacob deGrom and James McCann has appeal if it is not something that becomes a routine occurrence, but I don’t think watching every Tom, Dick or Jose fan 14 in 7 innings provides much entertainment.
when is that happening? Entertainment is relative, if its a good game, its a good game, whether or not there’s a bunch of homers, a steal of home, 10 Ks, a no-hitter, etc. Every game is different, and that’s fun. We have people loving the shift, hating the shift, loving homers, hating homers, wanting to see more steals, owners wanting less steals as hands are a big part of the game and busted fingers for a steal isn’t worth it, etc. Enjoy how you want to enjoy. All these comments (not just yours) are just a lot of old man yelling get off my lawn. Baseball needs more fans, and this infighting amongst current fans is silly, and not bringing new fans in.
No one is going to hit deGrom anyway
Realistically, the problem is that MLB doesn’t know what it wants. Relative to historical norms, it wants shorter games, more offense, and fewer true outcome events. There is just no good way to do this. First off, the three true outcomes are not inherently correlated with each other, as we see here. You can wipe out home runs, as they did here, but we’re seeing tons of strikeouts. Second, if you decrease home runs without changing much of anything else, you decrease offense. Third, if you increase offense without the instant-scoring of home runs you increase the length of games. Every time you pull one of these threads, you move yourself further away from a goal that you supposedly want.
The irony of this isn’t that MLB isn’t getting what they wanted. MLB is getting what they wanted, only to realize that their ideal outcome is both coming true and worse than the prior reality. MLB has no idea why it wants what it wants, and until it does we’re going to get crazy stuff like this.
The length of games isn’t really the problem — it’s the pace and lack of action.
Shrink the strike zone and deaden the ball. Pitchers will be forced to challenge hitters and hitters will put more balls in play.
As other articles have said, this seems like the worst case scenario relative to what MLB wanted, and it (to me) certainly hasn’t made watching games any more exciting.
I think it is step one in improving balls in play. Players aren’t going to adjust in a month. First, you see less good outcomes on flyballs, then you see hitters change approach and stop trying to hit everything in the air. Seems like a good step to achieving step 1.
My opinion is that changing things like this is incredibly unfair to the players. Trends take time to develop. Imagine you’re a guy who has tirelessly worked to develop his swing to hone in on what has been valuable and rewarded, and then once you’ve arrived and are finally feeling good about it, the ball gets changed and suddenly the balls you used to hit for HRs are now just long outs. MLB changed in 5 minutes what you have worked to harness for years, and now your career may be in jeopardy.
I don’t think it’s fair or reasonable to expect players to completely overhaul their entire swing in a few weeks or months just to adapt to a change that came from above for no good reason (no, I don’t think trying to cut down HRs, Ks, and BBs is a good reason).
Excellent comment. This bears repeating “I don’t think it’s fair or reasonable to expect players to completely overhaul their entire swing in a few weeks or months just to adapt to a change that came from above for no good reason (no, I don’t think trying to cut down HRs, Ks, and BBs is a good reason).”
See the previous article on Matt Carpenter on Fangraphs and here:
https://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2021/4/23/22395448/on-matt-carpenter-and-the-statcast-mirage-cardinals
They were published at around the same time. In the offseason, Carpenter specifically said that he went to a sports fitness/analytics place to see what he could do to improve his rotational speed and exit velocity. He was able to, and he’s hitting the ball harder than he has in recent years.
The problem is, with the deadened ball, it’s not hard *enough*. He hits the balls in similar launch angles to the most deadened areas noted in the first graphic in this article (from Devan’s awesome previous article on the topic). He’s precisely the guy who worked hard to try to cover his deficiency in recent years, and here he’s been particularly dinged by it. Go take a look at the difference between his wOBA and xwOBA. It’s stark.
Part of it too is that you can’t “unring the bell”, so to speak, the “bell” in this case being hitters using analytics to adjust their swing plane/trajectory to try to maximize carry and home runs. Whatever changes you make to the mound or the ball, in short enough order there will be reams of data for hitters to study and adjust accordingly. Which isn’t inherently a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just a true thing in the data-driven world that baseball has become.
This is part of the sentiment I’ve held, too. Think about how average Janes and Joes who just want to be healthier and fitter now have so many different ways to work out, so much more data with pedometers and heart rate monitors, so much more knowledge about science and nutrition. And, aside from health=wealth, these folks have little career incentive to pay attention to any of these things (simplistic view).
Then you take it up to the level where these guys can turn that exercise and nutrition into $50M, $100M, $200M++. And the amount of advanced tech, medicine, nutrition, and research available to them is insane. (though perfectly rational)
I tune in every now and then to Trevor Bauer’s youtube videos (b/c of boredom and curiosity and intrigue), and the way he casually references the ways in which he analyses his recovery/workout limits on a day-to-day basis is probably well ahead of where anyone could have been 20 or 30 years ago. I’m certain this is widespread throughout the bigs and even the upper minor leagues. Heck I’m sure even college athletes are keyed into all the telemetry we now have for the body. (Hopefully some of this will trickle down to we pedestrians in the coming decades, just like NASA/DARPA ballistics tracking tech has trickled down to Statcast.)
Can’t halt progress on that front. I mean you could. You could tell these guys to go to the bar after games, smoke cigars, work out less and eat more deep fried food. But I’m not sure that’s what we want either.
Haven’t looked too much into it yet, but I wonder if Mookie Betts is trying to adjust to account for the ball change, and struggling to adjust. His GB% is up, LD% has cratered, LA has dropped a bit, and his SS% has cratered. He certainly hasn’t been awful, but just down relative to typical Mookie.
Betts is one of those guys that depend on an insanely quick bat. His might be the fastest in baseball, and I’d be willing to consider he might be the fastest ever. That gives guys all sorts of wonderful advantages. However, it is definitely not a tool that’s going to age well. Now Mookie’s not old by any stretch, nor is he playing all that poorly. I will just note that often the first sign of a guy having summitted his career arc and working the other side is an increase in ground balls, because he’s just that microsecond behind and can’t get the barrel down to low pitches quickly enough. He turns 29 this year, so this is probably crap. But maybe not. I’ll be interested in what next year looks like for him.
When I started thinking about who the ball would hurt the most, the guy that came to mind first was Mookie. They used to have a stat (they still might) called lucky home runs, and just enough home runs. Every year that they measured it Mookie was league lead, or top two or three. It makes sense when he was at Fenway with the Green Monster, but it also stands to reason someone like Mookie who hits a lot of home runs who are barely over the fence would be someone who is the most affected by the ball change. If you look at his batted ball profile nothing ever really stands out in comparison to the rest of the MLB, except plate discipline. He never stood out in EV, max EV, etc. He always seemed to be a guy who the sum of his parts was better than if you look at certain contact based measures. Coincidentally the guy who stood out the most as someone the ball would hurt was Lindor, but that hasn’t been Lindors issue this year, that is for certain.
Vocabulary like “Just Enough” comes from ESPN’s Home Run Tracker (https://www.espn.com/mlb/homeruns/_/year/2018 ), which stopped posting public data after 2018 and gave way to Statcast, which uses different terminology. In particular, both sources use field dimensions at every major league park to determine how many parks a ball with that trajectory would have been a home run at, but they only do it for balls that were *actually* home runs in the game. Players could therefore get a “Lucky” home run that was out of their own park but wouldn’t have been enough anywhere else, while the opposite–a ball that would have been a home run at one or two parks, but was a mere fly out at the park they happened to be playing in–simply isn’t part of their data set at all, and such samples are naturally going to be biased in favor of players who play most of their games at the more extreme short-porches in the league
Well ya I wasn’t disagreeing. But my point is the example, Mookie. He is a great player. Good defender, good baserunner, good hitter. I do think that Mookie power hitter might be a bit overblown. He will likely be a 20-25 hr guy which is basically average for an everyday player. His value is largely tied to other things. Lot of other great players exploit their home ballpark which is a talent also! Djm hit a home run today that had a 170xba! Fly ball to right. Does that make him a worse hitter? Bregman also is the king of hitting home runs that won’t be out in other ballparks. Djm was basically the only hitter in mlb history who would be better outside of Coors by spray chart, but only in Yankee stadium. My point is we cannot expect these guys to be the same in other ballparks. It doesn’t make them worse players. Djm plays half his games at Yankee stadium, and exploiting a ballpark isn’t a hitters fault, we just cannot expect the same results elsewhere.
All the homers went to Shohei Ohtani’s bat
Okay, so flyballs are going to t he warning track to die…
What about other types of batted balls?
Hard gounders, squibbers, texas leaguers, and liners?
Likewise, what about pull vs oppos?
Are extreme pull hitters affected the same as opposite fielders?
Those numbers can inform how hitters adjust.
Off the top I’d expect pure pull homers to decline less, if at all, than all-fields homers.
Give analytics departments a little time to get a handle on it and transmit that information to hitters. They’ll adjust.
Agree with this. Adjustments are going to take time.
How much of an effect does fly ball hang time have with increased launch angles on fly balls with a deadened ball? If hitters were hitting fly balls with less hang time, there might be an increase in doubles in the gap, even if it’s slight.
I would just like to reiterate for the millionth time that MLB said they were going to deaden the ball, and they succeeded, and they got exactly what they wanted, and suddenly it’s even worse than it was before.
Sure, there are unintended side effects, but it’s the *intended* effects usually make the game worse off. They wanted fewer home runs. They got fewer home runs. What did they expect?
One other thing that I will repeat over and over again–messing with the ball is politically the easiest option because it’s invisible, the fans don’t know what’s happening, you don’t have to always get ownership and the MLBPA on the same page, etc. Which is why they did it this way. But they need to stop. Either they need to pick this ball or the last one and stay with it. The ball is so fundamental to the game that every time the ball switches you get all kinds of crazy stuff that the players then have to adjust to.
It’s politically more difficult to do things like moving the fences out (my preferred solution) or shrinking the strike zone at the top of the zone (my second preferred solution) or lowering the mound (my less preferred solution) but it’s pretty undeniable that all of these things would achieve a lot more of what MLB is going for in the longer-term…if they also stop messing with the ball.
moving the fences out is nearly identical to what they have done to the ball. But with the addition, agreed, of possibly more exciting doubles and triples etc. But most importantly it is very expensive AND costs seating areas so it is a non-starter.
Seems like every stadium has gone out of their way to move the fences in over the last 15 -20 years… not sure why they can’t just put them back.
Soo we get more fly ball outs? All the best defenders ever (besides Jones) by metrics stand incredibly deep. It isn’t that they are better defenders per se, ir is just basically how deep they stand. The math is simple for standing deep. It makes less doubles more singles. A lot of those balls you think would be doubles or triples would just be fly ball outs. This isn’t as easy to fix as some people think. Especially with the new ball that doesn’t travel as far…tons of balls ran down in the gap. That is why we are already seeing an absurd difference between xba and xwoba and real life,the seams create drag and balls hang.
Moving the fences back will simply make defenders play deeper and you will see more fly outs
The conclusion of a prior article on Fangraphs regarding the 2021 ball was that exit velocities were up — because the ball is springier — but increased drag was more than enough to overcome those initial exit velocities and reduce the distance. So while it seems on the surface like you are comparing apples to apples by using the same exit velocity range for 2019 and 2021, you are actually not.
Because the same bat to ball contact will result in a higher exit velocity in 2021 than 2019, to compare comparably hit balls you need to look at a higher exit velocity range for 2021 than 2019, presumably adjusted up by the percentage that exit velocity has increased in 2021 over 2019.
Of course that same increased drag presumably is causing balls pitched with spin to be affected more by that drag, i.e., to break harder, which also contributes to less contact (more Ks) and poorer contact (less hits on batted balls), but that is a different effect that should be considered separately.
I disagree only in that the raised seams that appear to my eye to be allowing pitches to break harder than ever before should be considered in tandem, not separately.
I certainly agree that in deciding whether to implement a non-insignificant change (e.g., changing the ball properties, the mound height, the distance from rubber to home plate, or something else), MLB should consider in tandem the effects on contact results and pitched balls, but I think those effects need to be understood separately to ensure that any such change is actually a solution.
Make the field larger and move the mound back. Big leaguers have outgrown the field just like kids do when they go from t-ball to little league to the full-sized field.
Moving the mound would be extremely unfair to pitchers and could easily result in more injuries.
Why?
MLB went exactly the opposite direction that I wanted – a reduced CORR and lower seams. Extra drag / higher seams makes breaking pitches look like pitchers are throwing wiffle balls. Line drives with any backspin have a higher EV but land like frisbees thrown with the nose up.
I’m sure MLB spoke to a physicist or two when considering ball design. I’m disappointed they went for the “cool” higher exit velocities instead of making the game more interesting: Give more benefit pitchers with command and separate the big hitters from those with bat control.
You wonder how the ball construction/makeup will change when some pitcher gets seriously injured by a comebacker to the head.
I feel near certain that it’s a “when” rather than an “if”.
Not that it hasn’t happened before, but with exit velocities moving ever-higher, the results skew grimmer and grimmer.
Yeah, it is going to be small consolation to the dead or seriously injured pitcher’s family that the drag on the 2021 ball slowed it a smidgen more than a 2019 ball would have, but only after coming off the bat with a lot more extra velocity due to the springiness of the 2021 ball, so their son/husband/father (a) was not able to react to get out of the way in time, and (b) was hit with quite a bit of extra force.
To the warning track.
Just shrink the strike zone and you’re going to solve a lot of problems.
The ball change was a big failure because it slightly reduced homers but mostly reduced contact by making the ball lighter and spinning more.
Making the ball deader can be done but mlb didn’t make the ball deader, it actually made the ball hotter (higher EV) but with more drag with helps ball movement and shortens fly ball distances.
So if you want more contact make the ball
-slightly more dead
-make it heavier
-make it less air resistant to reduce the magnus effect and make breaking balls less effective.
The current mlb ball change makes no sense at all.
Reading the article and a large portion of the comments, you’d think the league is suffering from a lack of HRs this season. That is not true. Currently, the number of HRs/game is 1.15 (per Baseball Reference). Note, that is per game, not per 9-innings. This rate is tied for 6th all-time. This season is still in the early, colder months and we have 7-inning double-headers and the funky “add a runner on second rule” for extra-innings to shorten the number of extra innings. I’m guessing that by season’s end, the number of HRs/game will be the 4th highest all-time (assuming no additional changes to the ball). Below is the list of the top HR rates by season.
2019 – 1.39 HR/G (shattered the previous record)
2020 – 1.28 (60-game season)
2017 – 1.26
2000 – 1.17
2016 – 1.16
2021 and 2018 – 1.15
1999 – 1.14
2004 and 2001 – 1.12
There is no lack of HRs this season. There just isn’t nearly as many as there were in 2019 (which was, comparatively, absurdly high).
It would be interesting to see if this reduction in base runners holds for lower hit balls like line drives and ground balls. The increased drag on the ball may reduce the incentive to hit fly balls and undo some of the “fly ball revolution” especially if it becomes more advantageous to focus on trying to hit line drives again. A successful change of this type would have the exact consequences we are seeing so it may be possible or even likely that mlb expected to see a temporary reduction in offence with the new ball while hitters adjust to a new optimal hitting profile.
I hate this solution but one answer would be to alter the bats to have larger sweet spots and lesser COR for perfectly squared up hits… Basically stop using wood bats. ETA – I hate this idea but it would have more balls in play with lighter bats (helps with hitting velocity!) and equivalent power. Wood bats are part of the soul of baseball. (Note: Tim Hudson pronounces it “‘luminum” but these days it would be a composite)
Another slightly better but still bad solution is to shave off the top 2 inches of the strike zone and send it back to the mid 90s where the belt was the top of the zone. Most of the delta is swings and misses on 4 seamers right at the letters. Those were takes 20 years ago.
As sadtrombone has explained — there are plenty of solutions out there, the problem is I’m not sure any of them are better than the supposed problem (I personally like the 2019 version of the game just fine!).
That said, changing the mound or distance is more offensive to my sense of continuity than adjustments to the ball or strike zone or fences. The WORST part of changing the ball is lack of transparency.
Lastly, there is not enough attention to the raised seams/increased drag being a gift to pitchers. Extra movement and everything looks like a mini changeup to a hitter’s brain because it slows down and sails on the way in like a wiffleball (as someone else said).
P.S. Note how I was able to summon the strength to type all 8 letters of the word “velocity”. I also hate it when journalists write “lede”. It’s pretentious and unnecessary. Typing “velo” is just people trying to adopt the jargon and follow the crowd but it’s idiotic.
All this talk about strike zone shrinking and mound lowering is fine, but let’s get the pitch clock in action and put some pressure on the pitchers. I want them to start 20 seconds from when they get the ball back from the catcher.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I love watching both strikeouts and home runs. Base hits and great defensive plays are fine too, but “balls in play” also includes a lot of routine ground outs and fly outs.
Players are smart and talented. I think they’ll learn about which launch angles work best with the new ball and alter their swing to attack it that way.