Baseball’s Winter Meetings came and went with enough transactional news – more than $3 billion in free-agent contracts have already been authorized this offseason – to keep the lobby of the Manchester Grand Hyatt buzzing beyond last call. It was enough to relegate the week’s most sensational report to a mere footnote.
According to a study of 204 baseballs published last week by InsiderMajor League Baseball utilized three different kinds of baseballs during the 2022 season, after using two different kinds in 2021.
That revelation alone was enough to cause concern among players who have voiced complaints about the inconsistency of the ball’s physical properties, particularly its weight and its carry off the bat. Pocket Insider‘s real bombshell lay in the details: the three balls were not distributed at random.
Specifically, Insider reported that a sample of 36 balls that weighed one gram heavier than a new baseball introduced for the 2022 regular season appeared in the postseason, at the All-Star Game and the Home Run Derby, and at regular-season Angels, Texas Rangers and New York Yankees games.
The Angels’ and Rangers’ balls had commemorative stamps on the outer cover. The Angels’ stamp recognized the 20th anniversary of their 2002 championship season. The Rangers’ stamp recognized their 50th anniversary as a franchise. The All-Star Game and Home Run Derby balls had commemorative stamps, too.
The heavier balls that appeared at Yankee games featured the same MLB stamp that appeared on the outside of the postseason balls, for games played up until the World Series. The World Series balls featured a special stamp.
Insider dubbed these balls “Goldilocks balls.” This ball was not as heavy as those collected by Dr. Meredith Wills, an astrophysicist who conducted the research for Insider, from games played later in the season. It was not as light as the baseballs in Wills’ sample that appeared in games played earlier in the season.
In an interview with the Southern California News Group, Wills said the production codes on the baseballs suggested that the lighter balls were left over from the 2021 season, and were out of circulation by the end of the regular season. Her sample suggests that, in the postseason, only the “Goldilocks” ball was in play.
Wills provided the research behind an Insider study of 2021 baseballs that revealed two different balls were in play last year, too. MLB confirmed the veracity of this report, saying that it circulated left-over baseballs intended for the COVID-shortened 2020 season.
But why use three baseballs in 2022?
According to the league, there was only one baseball in play.
“The conclusions of this research are wholly inaccurate and just plain wrong,” MLB said in a statement. “The 2022 MLB season exclusively used a single ball utilizing the manufacturing process change announced prior to the 2021 season, and all baseballs were well within MLB’s specifications.”
Wills’ research affirmed that every ball in her 2022 sample was within the specifications outlined in the official MLB rulebook. But why would the 204 balls tend to cleave around three different average weights? Again, MLB denied this finding of her research.
In response to a request from SCNG, the league provided statements from two independent experts contracted to inspect 2022 baseballs: Lloyd Smith of Washington State University, and Patrick Drane of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell.
Smith said his laboratory studied five batches of MLB balls taken throughout the 2022 season, controlled for temperature and humidity prior to testing. “I see no evidence from these data of a ball design change in 2022,” his statement said.
Drane said all the balls tested at his laboratory had “statistically normal distributions for both size and weight.”
“The UMass Lowell Baseball Research Center data which we collected do not substantiate the claim that different baseballs were produced for the 2022 Regular Season,” Drane said in the statement.
MLB is correct to pick at one possible flaw in the Insider report. Wills has not disclosed the chain of custody for each baseball in her study, which invites questions about where and how the balls were stored, and how those conditions might have affected the physical properties of each ball. For its part, MLB went to unprecedented lengths this season to preserve the conditions of the balls, requiring balls to be stored in a humidor in every park for the first time.
But the league has been less than fully transparent, too. After studying the composition of baseballs in play during the 2017 season, when a record number of home runs were hit, Wills said she shared her data with members of an MLB-commissioned “Home Run Committee.” She asked for the committee’s data too, but her request was denied because their data was deemed proprietary to the league.
The data Drane and Smith used to refute Insider‘s report also remains a secret, shielding it from public scrutiny of any possible flaws.
Last year, the league did not publicly acknowledge the key finding of Wills’ report – that there were two baseballs in use throughout the season – until contacted by Insider. MLB claimed it communicated the intentional use of two different baseballs to the Players’ Association, but the players reached by Insider were not aware.
Whether three balls were in play or merely one, transparency is essential in the baseball-distributing process. The reason is simple. The league owns a stake in Rawlings, which manufactures every game ball at its plant in Costa Rica. According to Wills, the balls are labeled with a code on the inside of the cover, and the boxes containing the balls have a code, too.
In practice, then, MLB can know exactly when the balls in each box were made, and where those balls are being distributed – whether a home game for the Angels, the Rangers, the Yankees, or anywhere else. That’s a basic hallmark of quality control. It’s also an invitation for conspiracy theorists to wonder, for example, why would there be a special ball at Yankee games?
The juicy answer is obvious: Yankees slugger Aaron Judge was pursuing the American League single-season home run record. He eventually caught and surpassed Roger Maris, finishing with 62. Each ball he hit over the fence was potentially among the most valuable pieces of baseball memorabilia ever created.
Wills cautioned against jumping to conclusions. Every “Goldilocks” ball she culled from a Yankee game was either taken from home batting practice at Yankee Stadium, or batting practice on the road, when the Yankees were the visiting team. It was a statistically significant quirk of distribution. It was not direct evidence that the game balls thrown to Aaron Judge were unfairly juiced.
Wills’ purpose of unraveling baseballs by hand, she said, was never to unravel a conspiracy.
“I hate that I’m in year five of doing this,” she said of her research. “None of this would be necessary if there was transparency from the beginning. MLB can avoid this by showing what was happening (with the baseball) from the beginning, or bringing in outside researchers, like me. Instead, they do everything internally.”