UTK Special 2/10/21
It's The Ball, Stupid
SI published an extensive piece, with graphics, on the research done by Dr. Meredith Wills, a solar astrophysicist and - full disclosure - a friend. Wills closely looked at a lot of balls …
… sorry, couldn’t resist. The study took a lot of balls, literally and figuratively, to publish. The results are clear, but they raise as many questions as they answer.
First, MLB is clearly in the crosshairs of players and the MLBPA for manipulation. Justin Verlander was first, as far as I know, but I talked with several players on several teams about this article and they all seemed to just assume that manipulation had happened in the past, just as MLB is saying they’re going to openly manipulate the ball to deaden it.
MLB is a part owner of Rawlings/Easton, the baseball’s manufacturer, but as I’ve noted here before, MLB bought it alongside Seidler Equity, the private equity arm of the O’Malley family, which just took control of the San Diego Padres after being minority owners for several years. I asked one AL player what he thought about the Padres essentially being the ball’s manufacturer.
His response could not be printed here, but it was like a West Texas field - filled with the byproduct of cows.
Moreover, there’s a question about how those balls got distributed. From the SI piece, here’s a quote:
“To determine whether the 2020Ls truly were live, Wills used MLB Statcast data to see if 2020 featured a higher percentage of tape-measure shots. She found that the changes varied from park to park—which made sense, since she could determine no pattern for where the 2020Ls were distributed—but that as many as 16 venues saw more long home runs than normal.”
16 is more than half of all parks, but if one of them was San Diego, the optics of it would look bad. There’s also a question of how the balls were distributed and put into play. Umpires rub up the balls and have some control over things. It’s hard to imagine the equipment managers and batboys that run them out to the umps would be able to tell which were “live” and “dead,” but it’s possible.
Let’s be clear - this requires something of a grand conspiracy. The manufacturer would have to know whether it is making “live” or “dead” balls. It would have to separate those and box them up. It would have to know which box is which. It would have to send those boxes in a way that an equipment manager would know which is which. He’d then have to give the balls to the ump and figure out some way to mark them so that he could bring them in to make sure the live balls happened when his team was hitting. There’s no way to control how the umpires distribute the balls or how often balls are changed (it’s normally a lot). There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone did this, nor is it possible that even experts can tell the balls apart, by sight or feel, without taking the ball apart and checking either the structure or the code printed inside the ball.
Of course, this is very, very unlikely and very, very dangerous. A simpler way to game the system would simply be to figure out what teams would benefit from which ball and either giving them the one that helped or hurt. A big power team like the Yankees could get the deader ball and a pitching-first team would get the live balls. One source suggested giving a team a mix would be even more deleterious, since the inconsistency would be even more problematic.
It is possible to get an idea, if not to know for sure, whether this happened. I asked Dan Szymborski, the man behind the excellent ZIPS projections, to look back at his 2020 projections to tell me how many homers he expected the Padres to hit. Stunningly, the Padres nearly led the league in exceeding power expectations. ZIPS expected the Padres to hit 76 homers in last year’s shortened season. Instead, they hit 95, a 19 percent outperformance. That’s second only to the Giants, who were 20 percent over expectations.
Again, there are many reasons why the Padres might have seen this increase. The emergence of Fernando Tatis, the surprising season of Trent Grisham, and players like Manny Machado and Wil Myers hitting homers at a higher but not suspect rate, compared to 2019. It simply must be noted.
There’s also a lot of teams that underperformed. There are seven teams - the Rangers, Cubs, Astros, A’s, Rockies, Cardinals, Diamondbacks, and Indians - who were at least 10 percent down. This could be just bad years, or down years from where a team like the Indians and Astros had been recently, or this could be drawing the wrong kind of balls.
If you want to go beyond simple count of home runs and look at distance, there again, there’s at least the suggestion that the Padres were the beneficiary of the live ball. Several players, including Tatis, appear to have more distance than standard, though I’m loathe to look specifically at Tatis in a season where he emerged as a top talent and at such a young age. It looked a lot like a breakout season to me.
One more way this could be problematic is the effect on defense. While its easy to think about how the ball carries over the fence, what it does inside the fence or even on the ground is equally problematic. A wormburner with a live ball is going to scoot past the shortstop more. A live ball is going to have a bit more carry, perhaps just past the outstretched glove of an outfielder. The dead ball will have the opposite effect, but overall, the inconsistency makes it tougher for any defender to get the kind of good read necessary for defense.
There’s others out there, like “Choice Fielder” who have gone in depth with the distance data, though I feel like this is a bit premature until even know if the ball is deadened, let alone how much, and whether it’s going to be consistent. It’s still intriguing. Somehow I don’t think holding back Amed Rosario and Raimel Tapia was the intention of the policy. (Fielder’s entire output on this is worth reading.)
If debates about five and ten percent of distance sound familiar, you probably lived through the steroid debates of the aughts. People would assume there was an easy, round, and consistent boost that steroids gave to hitters and they would try to - without the data we have now - try to tell people how many home runs the players they felt were cheating “stole.” Fielder doesn’t appear to be manipulating the data to fit a viewpoint as was so often done then, but the intent and the outcomes probably don’t match up, as the above chart shows. If this projection is how things play out, that is.
As for the possible deadening of the ball, I’ll give you a little preview. This Friday, I’ll be conducting an experiment that could give us some idea of the difference between a deadened ball and the “normal” 2019 style balls. I won’t go into details yet, but tools like HitTrax and Rapsodo should give us a very good idea what the difference is going to be heading into 2021, which might give us an edge in fantasy projections. I’ll have those results as soon as I can.
Let me be clear - I’m not saying that something nefarious has been going on with MLB, Rob Manfred, Rawlings, or Seidler Equity. Logic and evidence suggest that it did not, but this isn’t a sport that often deals with problems like boosted home runs by applying logic. The fact that the possibility exists is wrong in and of itself. This potential has to be corrected and corrected quickly, though I’ll be honest and say I don’t know how that works short of divestment. I just know, this is a problem for baseball.