Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1781: Hidden Balls Trick

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about listener responses to their earlier conversation about the proper pluralization of “hit by pitch,” then (11:41) bring on Bradford William Davis and Dr. Meredith Wills to discuss the reporting and research that revealed that two types of baseballs were used during the 2021 MLB regular season, as well […]

Here's your wake-up call. Hello and welcome to episode 1781 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Quite well, how are you? Well, I didn't get inducted into the Hall of Fame, but I am otherwise well. Yeah, it seemed like everyone was all of a sudden. Six new inductees headlined by

Buck O'Neill and Minnie Mignoso. Okay, not everyone. There were some deserving candidates who were left on the outside still looking in. It was generally, I guess, good news with still some frustrations. And it was kind of nice to have some Hall of Fame news that was largely not about the character clause. Not that we can't have character clause discussions, but it was a refreshing change just

to talk about good characters in some cases, and players just judged on their merits as players. And we will actually devote most of our next episode to that. So didn't want to give it short shrift. We will have a guest on to talk to us about all of the new Hall of Famers. But we did want to spend this episode catching up on some pretty big news from last week, which was maybe a little lost in the shuffle amid the beginning of the lockout, a report by Bradford William Davis based on research by Dr. Meredith Wills about the fact that there were multiple baseballs in use last season. Okay, multiple models of baseballs. Everyone knew that there were multiple baseballs used last year, but two different types of

baseballs were used in Major League games, and MLB came out and admitted it. And according to Bradford's reporting, seemingly no one else was aware of this. So it caused a bit of a stir, and we will be talking to both of them in just a moment. The only thing I wanted to say before we bring them on, we got a lot of responses to our discussion last time about the proper way to pluralize hit by pitch. This is how we're going to get through the lockout, just talking about how you make hit by pitch plural. So our discussion, which was in response to a listener email, mostly centered on whether it should be hits by pitch or hit by pitches. And a lot of people wrote in to propose alternative methods. Some people sided with one or the other.

One popular suggestion was to pluralize both and go with hits by pitches. So listener Ben, among many others, said, I think it sort of works because both the hitting of the batter and the number of pitches are plural. The batter gets hit multiple times and hit by multiple pitches. Also, it avoids the implication that the batter was hit by multiple pitches within the same at bat. And by pitches makes it sound less like the total number of hits a batter got in different categories of pitch. So hits by pitches was a somewhat popular suggestion i don't know that i would prefer that to hits by pitch but a bunch of people apparently preferred it yes people seem to to enjoy that one

there were a number of folks who suggested that we revert to hit batsmen yeah i i can appreciate that if it were a stat that we largely cared about within the context of pitchers but i think that it kind of puts the emphasis on the wrong syllable as it were um when it comes to to hitters because they are not hitting batsmen they are right they are themselves the hit batsmen so there's that and maybe we would make it gender neutral too i think cricket i believe recently switched from batsman to batters so we could go with hit batters but yes it still has that issue that you mentioned there yes and i i think we had another suggestion times hit by pitch yeah i meant to mention that last time because i mentioned that i will try to write

around right by pitches or hits by pitch wherever I can. And sometimes I might say plunkings or something like that, but often I will write or say times hit by pitch. And I do kind of like that. So you just say so-and-so walked 50 times and struck out 100 times and had 15 times hit by pitch. Something like that might work because as people pointed out, in this context, hit isn't a noun exactly. It's like a past participle verb. And so you throw the extra noun in there that you can pluralize and have it be times hit by pitch.

It's an extra word, and I guess it kind of disrupts the acronym. I mean, hit by pitch is still in there, but really it's like T-H-B-P. So it's problematic either way. We got people suggesting like bases on hit by pitch so that it would be parallel with bases on balls or maybe beans or beanings or something instead of plunkings, which I don't really like because to me, a beaning is intentional. Right. And also maybe specifically in the head, that is the bean that beaning is referring to. I know it's become a bit broader maybe, but to me, that's not necessarily an accidental hit by pitch in the butt. That's not a beaning really.

So I guess we should note that Saber has a style guide, a baseball style guide that some publications adhere to. We mostly use it at Fangraphs. We mostly. And then we diverge because, of course, we do. Right. And Saber advises that HBP is acceptable and that the plural is HBPs, so not H is bp but that also they hyphenate hit by pitch so they just go hit hyphen by hyphen pitch and then the plural is hyphenated also so it's just hit hyphen by hyphen pitches i don't love the hyphenation there although it does sort of resolve

the pluralization issue because if it's like one word if it's hit by pitch it's just a discrete unit then you can just say hit by pitches and it's all hyphenated and that sort of simplifies the pluralization problem maybe but i don't love hyphenating it in all cases ben can i admit? Sure. And this is going to offend any number of our listeners, but perhaps most especially my predecessor at Fangraph, should he be listening, Carson Sestouli. I think we over-hyphenate. As a culture, we have a fixation on hyphenations. And look, sometimes you need to hyphenate in order to have clarity. I think that as an editor, my prevailing philosophy around style guides and grammar rules and writing in general is that one of the things you should prize more than anything is clarity

because you're asking a reader to spend some time with you and you want them to understand what you're trying to say. And I think that sometimes, especially in like the advanced stat context, we as a collective don't do as well with that as we could. I think that we are in general much stronger on that score than we used to be, both because our readers have a better baseline understanding of advanced stats and because I think that clarity

rather than cleverness is sort of something that we strive for. But also we sure think that people struggle to understand things if they're not hyphenated from here to kingdom come. I think we could hyphenate a lot less and everyone would just be fine. They just would be fine, Ben. Yeah. I mean, I'm an Oxford comma man.

Me too. So when people say, oh, yeah, we don't need the comma we'll understand it i know there's some ambiguous cases but i prefer having that comma and there are cases where people will under hyphenate at times too but really just in general hyphenation as an editor this may not be the most relatable topic that we have ever considered on this podcast but it can be very mystifying the choices that writers will make sometimes and and there are writers i read and i'm very familiar with their hyphenation foibles not at fangraphs of course but there are people who will hyphenate like years old like at the end of saying like so and so was 50 years old like if you say it's a 50-year-old person, then you hyphenate.

If you're just saying so-and-so is 50 years old, you don't have to hyphenate years old. And then I always think like, well, should I tell them? No, there's no possible way I could say, hey, just in case you were wondering, I noticed that you have this odd hyphenation foible. There's no way to do that without sounding pedantic. And yet I notice it every single time this is just you develop editor eyes at a certain point and most people probably skim over this and couldn't care less but when it's your job to either put the hyphens in or take the hyphens out then you become fixated on it forever now people listening to this podcast who read vangraphs

regularly might have their own views on some of these things and they might disagree with my views and so they are listening to you say that and listening to me go yep and they're going but meg you do x y and z thing and the great thing about being the managing editor is that you get to say we hyphenate too much and we're not gonna do it and then everyone does it because you're the one who edits their copy before it goes live so when i see something like that i assume that the writer has like a deep and abiding preference that is informed by some life experience or a moment of confusion when they were a young person reading a hyphenated a less hyphenated text and suddenly they're like we must put it in and so i don't feel the need to correct them because i just assume that they like me think

that some rules are kind of silly and are using their authority to defy them. And that's fine. That's how language adapts. It's all fine. But also, we hyphenate way too damn much. We all know. We all understand. We can deal with compound adjectives.

You know, it's like you have typos in text and you understand what it says because your brain is amazing and fills it in and figures it out because our brains are freaking rad. So anyway, hyphenate less and come up with a new hit-by-pitch acronym. Let's go where no one has gone before. Yeah, you can over-explain sometimes. Some listeners were saying, well, you can't say times hit by pitch because then it makes it sound like you have multiple times getting hit by the same pitch. So you should say times hit by a pitch, perhaps. That would be one way to do it.

Or that you shouldn't say that you had X hits by pitch. You should say that you were hit by X pitches instead. But again, then it's more words and then you can't pluralize it as easily. Or there are certain times when you can say one thing and you can't pluralize it as easily or there are certain times when you can say one thing and you can't say another or it would disrupt a list of things when you're saying that he had this many of that and that many of that and this many times hit by pitch a pitch there's just no easy answer but this was our hot hyphenation talk and hit by pitch-pitch banter for today. But the real pressing issue is not how to pluralize hit-by-pitch, but which ball you were hit by when you were hit by a pitch.

Very good transition, Ben. Just top-notch. Thank you very much. So let's get to our interview segment. In 2019, Rob Manfred said, if we make a decision to change the baseball, you're going to hear about it. Well, in 2021, MLB decided to use two different models of baseball in major league games, and we didn't hear about it at all until it was uncovered by the research and reporting of our guests today, Dr. Meredith Wills and Bradford William Davis. You've heard them both before on the show, but as a refresher, Meredith is a data scientist and astrophysicist who has, in the past few years, used her knitting skills and analysis skills to become one of the foremost destroyers of baseballs. Meredith, welcome back. Thanks for having me And Bradford writes investigative features for Insider Including the one from last week

That built on Meredith's work And coaxed an admission from the league Forced an admission from the league Maybe welcome back Bradford Yo good to have Good to be back rather By the way it was quite a power move to publish this piece While you were on vacation

It was like I'll just drop this match And walk away from the fire and I'll be over here sipping butter beers at Universal Studios. That's a good way to do it. Yeah. So Meredith, let's talk about the two baseballs here and the timeline as best as we can establish it here.

And maybe you can summarize your methods too. I know that we've asked you about it on the podcast before, but for those who are just joining us. So two different baseball models in use, what separates those models in terms of construction and ball behavior? Well, the best details on this actually are in an article that Stephanie Apstein wrote for Sports Illustrated back in February, because it turns out the same two balls were used in 2020. It just didn't come up as much. So in this case, the balls themselves on the outside are basically the same. You can't tell them apart if you're holding them, if you're looking at them. But if you take the leather covers off, there's a wound portion on the inside that we call the center.

That's the thread. And then there's layers of yarn and ultimately that cork and rubber pill, which is the very core of the ball. And it turns out that those two centers are noticeably different weights. It turns out the difference is about two and a half grams which doesn't sound like a lot except that the precision on those weights is much less than that. And so if you actually look at the measurements, there's really no question as to which ball is which. But until you take the covers off, you really can't tell. You might have lighter ones that are much lighter or heavier ones that

are much heavier, but a lot of them, no, they're too close to each other with the covers on. And how did the two different balls behave? That's a good question. What MLB said, and again, this was originally reported in Sports Illustrated, was that the new ball was specifically designed to decrease home runs. Now, they didn't do that necessarily by changing the drag. In fact, they didn't even test the drag. What they did was they made the ball so that that center I was talking about, that the innermost layer of yarn, there are three layers, the innermost layer was being wound more loosely. Now when that is not as dense, what you end up with is it can just squish down more and it's not going to come off the bat as

hard. A good analogy would be under inflating a basketball. It's just not going to bounce if it's not going to come off the bat as hard. A good analogy would be under inflating a basketball. It's just not gonna bounce if it's under inflated. So same idea. The problem unfortunately is that those tests and there was an article in the athletic that was, I wanna say it was Britt Baroli, Eno Saris and Lindsay Adler. I think that's right. Yep, those are the three.

They did confirm with Rawlings that the tests were basically only done in a lab. And it was only for that bounciness, for what's called the coefficient of restitution, or the COR. And so in the lab, it was fine. But as soon as you took them outside and tried to use them in games, that's not what they did. It looks like that center, it's wool. And wool turns out to be much more sensitive to humidity than I think people realize. So in the lab, it would have been more humid.

And anybody here have experience with frizzy hair? Yep. Okay. So you know how when it's more humid, your hair gets frizzier than you'd like? Yeah. And when the humidity goes down, it flattens, relatively speaking. So in this case, under the more humid conditions, that center was staying as big as they wanted it and as less dense as they wanted it. But in less humid conditions, which seems to have been a lot of outside conditions in the summertime, the humidity was lower.

And the problem is that you sort of unfrizz it, as it were. And so suddenly that less dense center was collapsing down. At least that's what it looks like based on some of the preliminary stuff I've done. And the problem with that collapsing down is the whole point was to under-inflate the basketball so it would come off the bat faster. To sort of take that analogy further,

if you suddenly made the basketball smaller so that the amount of air was the same, relatively speaking, it's gonna bounce just as well, except now it's gonna be smaller too. And it turns out that it makes it easier to then come not off the bat, not just as hard, but a lighter ball will actually then be able to be hit farther, or at least faster coming off, because, you know, it's also lighter. So, you know, you can impart more energy on it. So instead, it looks like exit velocities were going up, not down. And on top of that,

even though drag was not taken into account, they treated it as if it was going to be the same. And it looks more like the drag under those conditions went up and the exit velocities may have also been high enough to compensate for the increased drag. So home runs didn't go down nearly as much as we wanted. And exit velocities seem to have gone up, not down. But even that wouldn't be consistent because it would depend on if their park has a humidor,

it would depend on the time of year. This is a lot of problems. So I guess the answer to the question is there's only a partial answer to the question and we're really not sure. And these balls are handmade. And so we would expect there to be some variation within a lot just because of vagaries in the manufacturing process. But you were able to determine that the variation you were seeing was not random, which is what we might expect in one lot. So how were you able to determine that these effects were not and differences in weight

were not just random variants? Well, one of the things to take into account is that a lot of that variation isn't the whole ball. It's the covers tend to have huge variations, particularly in weight. So, you know, those internal measurements, you know, I would get a center would be, you know, 127 grams plus or minus, you know, less than a gram, or maybe of the order of a gram. On the other hand, I would find leather covers anywhere from like 14 to 20 grams. So it's not, that variation does seem like a lot of it is the covers. And that makes sense because once you get inside them, anything that's wound with the ball,

a human being checks those measurements, but there's a machine that winds them. So the balls are wound on a machine, and not only that, but the different layers of yarn, the machine stops when a layer gets to a certain weight. And so that's literally the trip, and it's an automated trip. It's not a human being making a decision. On top of that, the way baseball manufacturing generally works is a human being then checks the weight. So there's even a quality control after each layer is wound on.

So that's the only really precise part of the ball manufacturing. And once you take human beings out of the equation, that ball to ball variation is not an issue in the same way. I mean, you still have, and Ben can speak to this, when you have those covers on it does become something in the aggregate you know seam heights are very hard to find consistently unless they're very very different drag overall is not something you can tell from one ball or even a dozen you need a huge chunk you need thousands you need stat cast data so um this is on that short list of you don't need a lot of information to still show that there's something for real happening. So when Stephanie wrote about Meredith's research early this year about the 2020 ball

and the fact that there seemed to be multiple models of the ball in use, an MLB spokesperson told her at the time that yes, MLB did change the balls, but that the new balls were only authorized for use in exhibitions and for testing. They had not been or had not supposed to be used in Major League games, despite the fact that Meredith seemed to have uncovered plenty that were actually used in MLB games. So Bradford, when you went to MLB with the latest research from Meredith, what did they say and how did that comport or conflict with what Meredith found about the timing of the use of these balls? They said a lot of big things. They said a lot of nothing. The big thing was a concession, an admission. Yes, we used two baseballs. That was cool to get that, obviously. The reasons for why they had two baseballs were, to me, pretty specious. you've heard of it was b factor in um needing to use the old design baseball despite announcing a

new design baseball back in february announcing is their words by the way i i wouldn't necessarily call it announcing it was more of a you know a memo that had leaked out you know to uh lincoln rolls and all the athletic and was reported on in sports illustrated you know based based on them uh that is that is stephanie should say you know, based on them, that is Stephanie, I should say, you know, Stephanie and Sports Illustrated confronting Moby with Meredith's research in hand. Right. Leaked out immediately after Stephanie had talked to them. And now this is more of, I should say, a journalistic probing within the mission of that, followed

by a leak, you know, shortly around the time of the probing. Right. So, but I digress. The point is, they said that and that they you know that it was public knowledge though that uh major league baseball was moving towards this new this new lighter ball but what they claim is the pandemic you know create a situation where they needed to use the older design baseball in their inventory however where if that were true why did major league baseball continue to manufacture the old design baseball new new version's not the

right word but but newer old design baseball so that makes sense as recently as August based on narrative sample they also said that they alerted the uh MLBPA the players association that's uh baseball's union baseball players union in America and uh they said that they that they were aware of the two ball thing happening as well as their scientific experts. However, I can't seem to find a single scientific expert or player who was aware of this happening or at least admits being aware of it. baseball had created with a bunch of, you know, expert scientists, you know, in their respective fields to analyze the recent surge in home runs across the league. You know, Alan Nathan was the chair of that committee, and he said that he would rather leave, you know, when I approached him for comment, that he'd rather leave any comments to baseball to wrongs or major league baseball.

So that was, you know, their scientific expert, the one that had been publicly touting you know what the what the baseball was or wasn't or you know or how it's designed reformed and what they were doing with it you know he effectively declined you know no comment to decline comment every player i've spoken to is is somewhere between confused bewildered flummoxed or furious about about there being two baseballs and players on various you know this is not I can guarantee you to every bit of knowledge I have this is not coordinated in any way I spoke to many different people you know and across different teams and they're all like what there's two baseballs now I wouldn't characterize it as as a surprise what you know it was you know they these these guys are

are truly the experts on how the baseball works because they use it every day and they noticed that some would you know rocket off the bat and some would die out in a warning track you know and so they were so they were totally cognizant of issues with the baseball sort of like varying but what they had not quite realized say for I guess Pete Alonzo if you recall his his uh theory that major league baseball was League Baseball was switching between baseballs to suppress hitters or pitchers, depending on whatever free agent market was stronger that year, projected to be stronger that year, and thus suppress salaries. That was his theory. I'm not sure it's true, but the fact that they would use two baseballs, I think, genuinely invites questions as crazy as that. Maybe. And so anyway, all the players were all like, yeah, we've never heard this before.

You know, so I so again, it's not it's not impossible that the dozens of people I've spoken to players and coaches in front office workers are all like, you know, fibbing to me in a coordinated campaign. But I just think that it's unlikely. I want to get to the players reaction to this and sort of how it is perhaps exacerbating the existing tension that exists between the league and the players' association as they embark on the CBA negotiation. But before we move on to that, I'd be remiss, Meredith, in the process of confirming that,

as Bradford put it, the old new baseballs were indeed manufactured more recently and were not sort of leftover inventory, you cracked the code of batch codes. So can you briefly explain how that factored into your analysis for our listeners? Well, I mean, when you think baseball, the first thing that comes to mind is cryptography, right? So yeah, it turns out that there is a code that Rawlings uses. And in fact, it's not just baseballs. It's published out there if you know where to look, because it's been used in the past as well to label baseball gloves so that you can tell when they were manufactured. In fact, even if you look at a label on a minor league ball where it's stamped on the

outside, or actually NCAA too, it's stamped on the outside. It says China. Very often it's got a little code above it. And so if you know this conversion, it's called the Black Horse Code. So you just take the word Black Horse, which has got 10 letters, and each of those letters corresponds to a number. So B is 1, L is 2, A is three, up to E being zero. Once you know that, those seven letter codes, if you plug in the numbers, what you get is two digits for a month, two digits for a year, and then three digits at the end that are the equivalent

of a production week. And, you know And Rawlings has confirmed that these production lots, as it were, are about a week long. That's also what my data show. Once you start looking at, you'll have roughly four of them in a month, say. But what that meant was that I was able to, frankly, I've been able to go back to the, you know, the mid 90s, these codes go back a long way. But I was able to put baseballs in order, essentially for when they would have been

manufactured. And I'm going to jump to maybe what's going to be asked next, which is that it turns out that once you know when the balls were made and can put them in order, the way that the balls were manufactured, it wasn't like new balls and old balls were being made at the same time. You actually had several months at a time where only the old ball was made. And then there was a sudden change for several months of the new ball being made and then another sudden change to go back and 2020 production did that but 2021 did as well so we literally had for 2021 you know they had made a few months of old balls. They had made almost all of the 2021 new balls. And right around when that memo was sent to teams, they were switching back to making those old balls that they said, you know, just weren't supposed to be there.

either. Basically, people were led to believe that 2021 season had only ever been intended to have new baseballs, when in fact, it looks more like two thirds of manufacturing was the old baseball for 2021. Jed Macosko Bradford, did MLB offer any details about how they supposedly notify the union? Because if you know, if Manfred emails Tony Clark and says, hey, here's an announcement, we're changing the ball, and then Tony Clark just doesn't read the email or something and doesn't tell anyone, maybe that's on the union. But if it's buried in a footnote in small print on page 73

of some unrelated document that technically was sent to the union but wasn't brought to anyone's attention then yeah i guess you could claim that they told people but not in a way so that anyone would actually know no they did not they did not explain explain how they informed the union uh-huh okay yes it was a complete sentence right so yeah yeah no uh-huh and seems like i mean you talked to like high-ranking player members of the union who would know it seems like if union leaders were aware it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't have known in some way so can you sort of sum up i mean you mentioned the emotions really ran the gamut but what was the general tenor of the responses that you got from players who were hearing this for the first time, at least officially? Yeah, I mean, it confirmed suspicions that they had about knowing that they weren't crazy for thinking that the baseball acts weird sometimes.

And that not only that, but noting it to be a fairly recent phenomena. And that not only that, but noting it to be a fairly recent phenomena. In their careers, of course. There are historic examples well beyond some of these people's even date of births. But in their playing careers, in their minor league or major league playing careers, they had not experienced this before. So yeah, there was a lot of confirmation. Like, okay, I was being gaslit. I wasn't going crazy and uh then you know and then i think there was a certain among some people like a desire for

some sort of i guess quality control process to be set up that's what someone some of the players who i spoke to you know express like you know even it was like an independent third party that's like like a joint partnership between the league and the, and the PA. Not unlike, I guess their drug, you know, the drug and anti-doping policy, right? Has this joint partnership. But yeah, they're not doing, you know, they didn't have that. They don't have that right now. And it was certainly like that. I know that it is not the first, the very first order of concern because the more explicit and direct, you know, black and red, you know, sort of like economic issues that are bandied about and discussed, you know, a whole lot in the media right now

are, you know, things that the players are focused on, first of all, but many of them do notice that or believe that besides it just being kind of messed up to have two balls being used without their knowledge or consent, that it can also be, you also be an economic issue as well, especially if they so happen to be using a disproportionate amount of ball A versus ball B, which, by the way, has not been determined yet because that's beyond the scope of the study that Meredith conducted on these balls. But we would need tons of data.

So anyway anyway if anyone has data you know holler at bwd.nyc but there's a belief though that if there is a disproportionate amount of the old ball versus the new ball that could that could you know going to one stadium or going to certain games or going to you know i don't know the playoffs even you know whatever that could actually affect outcomes in a way that is patently unfair, you know? In fact, you know, one article that came out kind of recently was from Derek Albin at the Views from 314 Yankees blog. Very good Yankees blog, worth anyone's read, especially if you're a Yankees fan. He was looking at StatCast data and noticed that, at least in Yankee Stadium, that their hitters weren't getting the same results on the road as they were at home, even controlling for quality of contact, like exit velocity and stuff. And so he posits that Yankee Stadium received a disproportionate amount of whichever ball suppressed offense more.

So this sort of thing is not unprecedented within the world of baseball. There have been other leagues internationally that have dealt with sort of inconsistent ball results that have later been proven to be under the purview of the league's sort of direction. So what precedent might we take from those instances in terms of what the recourse of the players is and what the leagues tend to do in response. Right. Well, you know, first of all, we don't have to just go international yet. One cross-sport American comparison I gave was actually the NBA, which had a ball controversy.

Actually, it is having a ball controversy right now. I'll get to that in a second. But in 2006, their former ball manufacturer, Spalding, went from an organic material, organic leather, whatever they use for basketballs, to a synthetic one. And the players did not get a whole lot of time to test that. I think only a few players at the All-Star Game that year or the previous season had tested their new synthetic prototype or whatever. But nonetheless, the league ushered in, the league and Spalding ushered in this uh synthetic ball and everyone hated it so for friends and fans of the NBA in 2016 you may remember like how much complaining there was so much so that Mark Cuban the owner of the Dallas Mavericks commissioned a study with which to try and understand how the ball was

negatively affecting the league and perhaps his team and uh it was such a big deal that the nbpa which was the uh union uh yeah what not was is the union uh you know representing uh nba players uh they filed a grievance with the national labor review board nlrb over just not being not having the proper round of input on what equipment they were using then uh flash forward to 2021 you know we are right now, and the NBA moved from Spalding to Wilson as their official ball manufacturer. And they actually did put more of an effort with which to include players on it. But people are still complaining about the current Wilson ball. I know that CJ McCollum was the president of the Portland Trailblazers star guard, but he's the president of the NBPA now. And he was collecting input from players about issues that they were having with the ball.

Apparently, three-point percentage is way down in the league this year, which some players, including some big stars like Paul George, Nikola Jokic, etc., they're all attributing that to the new grip of the ball just being not quite the same. new grip of the ball just being not quite the same you know it's not as not not quite as bad as it was you know in 2006 but but noticeable enough that some people you know believe that there's an adjusted period happening you know at the very least but then but then of course you go international you know there is nippon pro ball the uh excuse me i'm pronouncing that incorrectly but uh but the npb that's uh that's uh japan's top baseball league having uh you know a crisis in their own where mizuno had changed the the way the ball was made and home runs started skyrocketing. Their players union protested it and eventually the pressure from the players and I guess the fans or whatever led to their commissioner resigning pretty shortly after the changes to the ball were discovered and publicized.

the changes to the ball were discovered and publicized so um you know there is certainly like you know worst things that definitely happen to uh commissioners for uh being associated in any way with tampering the ball a lot of my quote rts for whatever it's worth were like fire manfred um so so fans are certainly picking up picking up on some of the possible implications of of you know of any sort of hint of tampering, you know, being, you know, being coming from the commissioner's office on this. And, you know, that was actually, I think the word tampering was one current scout used to describe what was going on with this situation. So now I, as far as the legal recourse, that seems to be unclear. I mean, I know that Major League Baseball recently took off changes um and they're off the table as far as a negotiating package you know with uh

the the union but right now um and uh and that that could affect the players advocating for some sort of you know again joint process like i was alluding to earlier you know but again if there are more implications to be found you know with the ball i could see it kind of anything happening especially if the effects have a more pronounced and defined financial impact you also quoted a scout who used the word aleatory which is a well-spoken scout oh that's a little bit when i first heard i'm like no i did not he did not say that word because i don't know what that word is and i had to google it uh my my translator my robotic translator picked that up and i'm like is that type of like you know no, it can't be.

It's a translator. So yeah, props to the Genius Scout. Well, the Genius Scout wasn't the only front office person you spoke with. I'm curious what the reaction of front office personnel is because, you know, obviously the direct monetary impact to players is going to be the most pronounced but the folks who populate team front offices want to have a somewhat predictable offensive environment to navigate and they want to know how the ball is going to behave and they too seem to have been caught flat-footed by this so what was their reaction upon hearing that it was two different balls

admittedly more muted you know i spoke to a lot of folks at the gm meetings so a lot of folks outside of that over the course of the last few months. You know, but what they did confirm, of course, was that they were under the understanding that they'd have one ball, not two. Again, who would even think that there, you know, that that would be even a thing to worry about of two separate balls. Again, besides Pete Alonso, the truest genius of all these people we're mentioning. You know, they confirmed their understanding of it being just one ball. They spoke about some of the, I guess, more analytically oriented folks do actually have R&D departments that do try and keep tabs as to what the offensive environment is going to be based on how the ball is constructed. So they are looking for those things.

Some people are. how the ball is constructed. So they are looking for those things. Some people are, you know, whether or not they're looking, you know, the exact same way Meredith was is, you know, I'm not privy to that, but like, you know, but a few people did confirm like that they have guys, you know, even if it's not their, they say the top pobos concern that, you know, there are people who do care about that stuff, you know, who do kind of like search, you know, for that edge, you know, wherever, wherever it can be found, you know, some, some executives mentioned like, yeah, there would certainly be a tangible sort of uh problem to having two different balls you know kind of floating around as far as making roster construction you know choices some coaches which as you know

are very connected to you know front offices or they they often act as liaisons with the information they're given you know discuss like certain players having seem to have a have a disparate impact on their offensive production you know based on the balls that they seem to be receiving. I think they're a little more guarded based on probably, I guess, I don't want to say rules because, again, I'm not privy to it, but I guess certainly understanding that they represent Major League Baseball in a way that players don't. They're interested in Major League Baseball.

But definitely some confusion and some certainly concession that we consider these things because they matter to how we like go about planning and executing you know our season. So Meredith these conversations about the ball have been going on for so long now several years. Someone should write a book about the ball and all of the twists and turns that this has taken. It might be a boring book. You're my go-to. Come on. If you just print out all the articles we've written, it would probably be book length at this point. Easily. I first wrote about this, I think, with Rob Arthur back in March of 2016, because the big

spike in home run rate that seems so suspicious was in mid-2015. And back then and for some time after that, Manfred and the league just constantly kind of denied or dissembled or said that they had no evidence that the ball had changed. And to be fair, maybe they didn't have evidence because they weren't actually doing the right tests that would show the significant difference in the ball until later. But what do you think explains why this has happened over the past several years because i think some people are mystified about the fact that seemingly as the production process should have improved if anything we have these wild fluctuations and variations and these are hand-stitched balls and you'd think that this sort of thing would have

been going on for a long time and maybe it was was, and we just didn't have StatCast, and we didn't have someone like you who's unraveling the balls and weighing them and studying them. And maybe if you were to rerun those analyses on earlier years and seasons, you would see the same sort of variation. strange outlier seasons like 1987 when there was no confirmed ball change, but it sure seems like there was a ball changed. And there were actual announced ball changes in some years too. But is it an artifact of the production process where actually getting better control of how the balls are manufactured may have led to these changes? Because you could say that maybe the ball was always changing and now we just have the tools to detect it, but the home run rate has never been nearly as high as it has been over the past several years, and we have not seen these wild swings previously. Well, I mean, to your point, and you're absolutely right in that we have seen fluctuations in the past. And the more I look into this, first of all, before, you know, 2019,

which does appear to have been a noticeable process change, process improvement would have been probably how they described it. It does not look like much was different other than that they used thicker laces. What you have to realize is that like if I were to take apart a ball from late 2015 through 2018 without being able to do something like check the batch codes, those would probably show up as identical the way that I look at things. I have a feeling that we ended up looking at baseballs during stat cast. And because of seeing this increase in home runs, it was taken to be more of an aberration. I mean, 2018 home runs went down, but we were just looking at, you know, end of 15, 16, 17. And what some of it again was because we had stat cast, but also we had a home run committee that was not really happy with the variations that tend to come along with the way Rawlings makes

baseballs. And they specifically asked for tighter tolerances, you know, more consistency in the ball. I have yet to see any evidence of somebody as part of that going in and figuring out how inconsistent the balls were to begin with based on how the manufacturing could be done. Like basically would it have been possible to make those uncertainties smaller? I'm not convinced that that was the case. I think they might've already been doing

as well as they could. I mean, Rawlings claimed before then that they made the best baseballs in the case. I think they might have already been doing as well as they could. I mean, Rawlings claimed before then that they made the best baseballs in the world. So that's a pretty high bar. And I'm sure we've all experienced this. There is no better way to break something than to fix something that you think is broken, but isn't. And I have a feeling that might have been what happened in 2019 was, okay, they got a ball that was more consistent. They got a ball that was ridiculously consistent. It also behaved nothing like a baseball normally does. Nobody liked the improved ball. I don't blame them. I didn't like it. However, we also have this issue where MLB, you know, they bought a percentage of Rawlings. You know, it looks like

as part of, you know, the home run committee recommendations and them having the ability to have more hands on with the process. One of the Padres owners bought the rest basically, but MLB has been in nominal control since 2018 because they own the manufacturing as well as being in control of the ball. That ends up being kind of a problem as far as information sharing, you know, back and forth. You end up having to rely on their good faith cooperation reaching out and that they are, you know, informing people as to what's going on in a way that's accurate. informing people as to what's going on in a way that's accurate. As yet, that has not been the case. People have not been told beforehand. And, you know, the after the fact explanations are unusual, to say the least. I certainly have no evidence going back. And I've got, you know, baseballs going back at least 20 years, that anything like this has happened. I don't think it would have dawned on anybody. You know, certainly, I was astonished in 2020,

someone sort of had to suggest to me, when I first saw these two kinds of baseballs, I talked to a friend and said, you know, this is really weird. I have these outliers. And he's like, you want to check and make sure if they're not just a different spec? And when I looked, I realized, no, my outliers weren't outliers. They were all the same as each other. And they were all made at the same time as each other. So what's happening, there's no precedent for it. So nobody's been prepared. I mean, why look for two kinds of baseballs, especially when they look and feel the same?

look for two kinds of baseballs, especially when they look and feel the same. You know, it's, we're, we're, we're like, this is off the map. And it's such an odd situation that we're in that I'm not sure, you know, I don't know, MLB having first tried to change the ball to fix it was one thing what's going on now, like I said, this is here you be dragons, basically. Yeah. So since it became clear that the ball was playing a part in the change in home run rate, which was a while ago and well before MLB finally admitted that that was the case, I think the prevailing question has been incompetence or conspiracy. Basically, like, are they unable to control the ball or are they intentionally manipulating the ball? And there has been no evidence I'm aware of of the latter. And maybe the longer this goes on and the more and more

these stories come to light, it's not as if, you know, if this were an intentional conspiracy, it's not as if they're operating in the shadows here because there is some embarrassing or scandalous story about the baseball seemingly every year at this point. So Bradford, you mentioned the Pete Alonso theory, which never really made sense to me conceptually, but I understand why there is a lot of skepticism just because there's been so little transparency surrounding this and sometimes just outright denials that later seem to have been disproven but i wonder whether you think there is even any upside for mlb in this like it's just story after story that makes the league look bad are there scenarios where this could actually be benefiting Major League Baseball in some way? I don't see it.

Yeah. I don't really see it either. It undermines the faith in the product and the competitive integrity. I mean, it's possible that the balls, the different models were just randomly distributed and maybe both teams in any given game were playing under the same circumstances you know like you could imagine okay one team is trailing in the game and then they break out a box of deader balls and now that team has a hard time coming back or something like that i mean that could actually affect competitive integrity if it's just you know here you have a game with just, you know, here you have a game with this model of ball and here you have a game with that model of ball. I don't know that there is a

way to game that exactly, especially if the teams and the players themselves don't know which ball they're using at any given time. But for fans knowing that this is going on, like how many times have we all watched a game and been surprised by how a ball did or didn't carry and how can you not when you know they're two models of baseball and they seem to be changing in the middle of a season or from the regular season to the postseason and how can you feel like you're watching the same game in a level playing field like even though these are all within the legal specifications which maybe are wider than they should be and i know they've been narrowed but even so you know it's

hard just to trust it like any ball that dies on the warning track or sneaks into the stands you're always thinking now not about how the ball was thrown or how the ball was hit necessarily but which ball it was there's a uh i think the best case scenario is just sort of the fulfillment of why do this you know like why screw around in that kind of way with two baseballs in once that is i think the best case scenario even if it's just like you know the sort of we want to see which ball works better and they were taking very granular you know day-to-day sort of of information analysis of like, you know, whatever ball is being used or balls. You know, again, it doesn't mean like sort of searching for that, like, tidy explanation.

And it's hard to it's hard to conceive of one. Is there what sort of conspiracies, racketeering, corruption, point shaving is otherwise possible if you have two balls and you know that they perform differently or believe them to perform differently and have for a reasonable reason? Actually, I want to jump in. We do know they perform differently. MLB confirmed they perform differently. they perform differently. MLB confirmed they perform differently. We've had balls that perform differently, even though I found no differences in the aggregate, they traveled very differently. They had different drag. This ball is so different, the odds of it not performing differently

are insanely small. Bradford, you mentioned the sort of possibility for exploitation here, and it comes up in the piece also. I guess one of the other reasons that I'm surprised by how persistent an issue this has been is because MLB has opened itself for business from a gambling perspective. And it would seem that having such an unpredictable ball and indeed two separate balls that are performing so differently as as meredith found opens them up to even if there isn't actual impropriety at least the appearance of impropriety that might end up costing people a great deal of money yeah i mean it's excellent timing from a business perspective to also have this baseball conspiracy sort of emerging when, you know, there's just a million prop bets that you just kind of – that you're inundated with if you watch a regionally televised game on most networks at this point.

You know, everything is – you know, with Bally Sports operates most games on a given day, you know. They're very much enmeshed with this with this gaming industry and i think it's very curious as to like what the operators or the the data companies that provide is like very actuarial or are supposed to receive very actuarial information you know like all the kinds of variables that go into spitting out a formula that produces an over-under or some sort of you know again choose again, choose to wager on. If they're not receiving a new variable of, you know, that is, has at least some importance to the on-field sort of product and the expectations of scoring or not scoring. Yeah.

That's the only reason I can think of why MLB would not proactively have come out and said that they were doing this. Like if we take them at their word that there were actual supply chain issues and pandemic-driven shortages, which is somewhat in doubt, as you said, but if that were the case, if they had come out and said, hey, we ran out of baseballs because of COVID, like, I feel like people would be somewhat understanding of that. I mean, maybe we'd all be more conscious of it, but it was a weird world in a weird time. And we're all used to dealing with those things in other walks of life.

But the fact that they just sat on this, didn't say anything until they were called out on it, is that to keep their gambling concerns happy? I mean, you'd think that people who just found out about this after the fact would be more upset about it and seemingly are more upset about it than if it had just been made clear from the start. And they had to know that Meredith would probably be doing this research again, just like last year, and that they were going to get questions about this at some point. So the lack of transparency, I think, is the part that is maybe most baffling to me. I mean, clearly people are looking into this. People are constantly asking questions.

Even if the upshot is, hey, we're not great at actually controlling the baseball, there would be more understanding and it would look less like a conspiracy. You'd have people less likely to make conspiracy theories if MLB just kind of walked us through what was happening here yeah the fact that they would you know attempt to do this opens up again more questions and answers you know and that's actually one of the things i was enjoying about writing about this is that like i'm genuinely curious i have there's a lot of stuff that we still don't know and i'm excited you know to keep kind of poking at it and i hope to see other people do as well did they dispute or push back on any aspect of your report haven't received any okay meredith is it safe to assume that if these balls behave differently we saw the home run rate come down this season not dramatically it's still extremely high from a historical perspective. But if the newer ball that didn't carry as well, presumably, was introduced this year, and they're planning to use that model exclusively next season, should we assume that offense and that home run rates will be lower next year, to the extent that we can trust that ball to be the same as the ball that

was used this year even well first i'm not entirely sure about whether the home run i mean the home run rate was actually not that much lower than 2017 it was only no right tiny amount lower than 2017. And I'm not sure that this new ball necessarily does have lower home run rates. And because of what I said before, exit velocities are up enough to compensate for the higher drag, then it kind of doesn't matter. But the other thing is that when MLB talked about, you know, yeah, we used all of these leftover balls from from because of COVID. I'm not how would I put this? It does look like there may have been something as far as a supply chain issue, but not in a way that changed at all, even when they started getting 2021 baseballs. And they still made both kinds for 2021. So they would not, even if they decided to just use the leftovers from 2020 and the new balls from 2021, they still wouldn't have had enough for an entire regular season.

But there were very, very few 2021 balls that were used before the All-Star break. And all of those, I didn't find any really that were made after September of 2020, which is only a tiny way into 2021 production. So it does look like there may have been a supply chain issue from Costa Rica, such that the balls that you normally would have seen in the first half just didn't show up. Like there were no balls stamped opening day, for example. Very unusual. That fits with a possible

supply chain issue. So in that way, yeah, the leftovers were being used. But this actually carries over into next season. Because once you start looking at the fact that they used very few 2021 balls in the first half. They mostly showed up in the second half, and we still were getting rid of 2020s. There's a huge percentage of 2021 balls probably sitting in inventory in St. Louis or somewhere. And I'm not confident based on what MLB did this past year, that they're not going to use up the 2021s in 2022. Moreover, you know, we're already well into 2022 production. That would have started, say, maybe the second half of August. And again, The Athlet athletic even said that. They said production was gonna turn over in July or August.

I found balls through the middle of August. And this article only came out the very end of November. By the very end of November, according to the production calendars I've seen for both 2020 and 2021, we should have already gone through the first part of 2022 production. If we take the same calendar, it would have been the old ball. And then if they were making them the same way, we would already be well into the production of the new ball. So assuming they were going to

change something, they would either keep making the new ball now or they would be scrambling to switch back to the old. But I'd be very surprised if we don't have two baseballs again next year. So I'm not sure that saying how the new ball will perform on its own is even valid. I doubt we're going to know that until we're far enough into the season to tell. And I cannot see MLB telling us ahead of time. They never have before. wrap up here i have a question for each of you they're they're related i guess bradford from a labor process perspective what do you think and i imagine this will not be the route that mlb ends up taking if we take history as any example here but what is their best route forward in terms of their work with the players association to make sure that everybody is on the same page because as you note at the end of the piece there are other changes planned changes potentially coming for the baseball that don't have anything to do with the coefficient of restitution but with the surface

of the ball right there they have tested a tackier version of the baseball in the arizona fall league in an effort to sort of curb the use of foreign substances by players. So they are going to need to get good buy-in from the players to avoid controversy around that. So for you, sort of what is the best process way forward for them? And then for Meredith, and this is perhaps a bigger question and a podcast unto itself, but from a quality control and sort of conceptualization perspective, what changes would you like to see them make and what sort of outside input would you like to see them request to try to arrive at a version of the baseball that is more predictable and more consistent year to year? And let's maybe start with Bradford and then we can go to Meredith.

I think from a labor perspective, the players really care more than anything else about is just input and transparency here and consistency. They want a ball to be made well. They want to have some clarity as to how it was made and how it should expect to perform and some ability to help the league in Rawlings create a ball that creates the best you know the best product for you know watching and

playing the game you know of course they're they're very invested in that of course and uh and they feel kind of locked out of the process which they are you know unless of course the union was in fact informed you know in some way but even you know but even still again the, you know, unless, of course, the union was, in fact, informed, you know, in some way. But, you know, but even still, again, the player, you know, dozens of players are all like, you know, we weren't told. So some sort of communication breakdown, you know, even if you take Major League Baseball statement at complete face value. And so, you know, there's a point where the responsibility for communication is like on the communicator here, you know, like not just a listener.

So you got to kind of own that or take that out so yeah i want to see you know i i would like to see that personally as a fan you know but like i think i imagine as workers you'd want to know what you're using and what and what its effects are how it's how you expect it to work and have some ability again to to at least be a part of that conversation right now they are more involved with the tacky ball process which uh is i guess better than right? But the baseline is so low at this point, hence an article like this resonating with Sony Eagle. Right. And then Meredith, in terms of the sort of manufacturing process and quality control, what does a good version of this really look like?

What does a good version of this really look like? Wow. Well, for starters, I think MLB's sole control of everything, basically, and the resulting the lack of requirement of any transparency is a problem. Them as the sole arbiter, it's very hard to justify that as the only one who has a say in the decisions and with no requirement to communicate them, that they're doing a great job on their own. One thing, so first of all, yes, making much more of this public than has been done already. A good example would be, I remember contacting MLB back about a little over a year ago. And I actually asked about winding machines for something totally unrelated to this manufacturing process. Considering it was October of 2020, that might explain the response I got, which was that their winding machines were considered intellectual

property. Like the number of winding machines. That was a question I asked. Their winding process, I guess at the time, because they were making that new baseball and hadn't told people, I can see why they wouldn't have wanted to talk about it. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese Baseball League, the CPBL, they actually changed their ball to deaden the inside. And not only they did the same looser winding on the inside, not only did they inform the public that they were doing this, they literally told them the number of raps that it had been and the number of raps it had been changed to. Total transparency. The idea that something like that is intellectual property, I would like them

to justify why these things need to be secret. I would also like to see what we can do for consistency, both with the current process and to see if there's not a better way to do it. I've actually looked at Olympic baseballs. They're very, very good. They are much better made than Rawlings baseballs, regardless of what Rawlings says. And, you know, yeah, I can see why players liked them. Very different process. I think it's worthwhile looking and seeing if you can change massive parts of the process to make the ball more consistent.

And consistency is important, go for it. But first of all, don't assume that the current process can be done better than it is without checking. There are a lot, like you said, this could be a whole podcast. There are a lot of different aspects to this. It has to not be in MLB sole control anymore is really what it comes down to. All right. Well, we will link to the report at Insider on our show page, as well as an Insider Twitter thread about it. And you can find our two guests today, Bradford and Meredith, on Twitter. Bradford is at BWD, BD BWD and Meredith is at baseball underscore astrophysics or BBL underscore astrophysics

without an I at the end we'll link to it it's hard to say sorry y'all yeah these are not the most easily pronounced Twitter handles the Twitter handle requirements were shorter ages ago it would have been

confusing to change it. Right. All right. Well, maybe you can change your Twitter handle the way that MLB can change the ball. We will see. We thank you both for coming on and for your research and reporting. Good to talk to you as always. Pleasure. Thanks. All right. One more brief follow-up. Last time we answered a listener email about what Wander Franco would be worth if he were Thanks. and I'm guessing he would get even more than the 11 years plus a club option that he actually got from the race. If he were on the open market, given how young he is and how much interest there would be, you might see 13, 14, 15 years, who knows. And he might not want a contract that long, of course. He might want to split it up and have a six or seven year deal and hit the market again in his prime. But if he wanted to absolutely maximize the term and the total dollars,

I saw someone in our Patreon Discord group suggest that $15 and $500 million wouldn't be out of the question. And yeah, that might be a bit rich. But if he signs with the team that offers him the most money, and some team is desperate to bring him in and build around him, it's not inconceivable that that kind of contract could occur. There's really no precedent for a 20-year-old who is already a superstar and is a free agent. Not in this era of baseball, so you're really in the realm of the hypothetical here, which is where this podcast often dwells.

A reminder to everyone to sign up for Effectively Wild Secret Santa if you are interested in exchanging inexpensive baseball-themed gifts with fellow listeners this month. The deadline to sign up is December 14th. I will link to where you can do that on the show page as usual. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or annual amount to help keep the podcast going and keep it ad-free and get themselves access to some perks. John M. Morrisrow, Adam Wentz, Jimmy Wilkinson, Sean Monigal, and Eric Ferg.

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and other podcast platforms. Your positive reviews on iTunes are very much appreciated. You can send me and Meg questions and comments via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can join the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. As I teased at the top, we will talk Hall of Fame next time. And a little later this week, we will resume our Stove League recaps and discussions with episodes 9 through 12.

Check the show page at Fangraphs or your podcast app for relevant links to everything we discussed today. And we will be back to talk to you a little later next week. And when we pass them by With your hand in mine Then they'll just smile and say

They're two of a kind