Juiced ball per Nathan Bishop

[Hanjag]

I was listening to 710 ESPN Bravo-Gulf-Tango

They had Nate Bishop in a nice interview and they discussed a bunch of M's stuff. The point he made was that there have been studies that indicate the MLB ball is clearly going further this year. He also delivered the news that AAA was using the MLB ball and AA was not. I don't know about the lower levels they were not mentioned.

This news should discount AAA offensive numbers.

[bpj]

It should make the .800 OPS's for our weak hitters suspect, yes. Which is great reason to look with a squint at Shed Long and Mallex Smith's AAA numbers.

On the other hand, guys like Sheffield may deserve a break on the pitching ERA side as well.

[D-train]

Promote pile Louis to AAA now!

[D-train]

Kyle Lewis. LOL

[Millikin]

As far as stats go, it doesn't really matter if the ball is juiced... Unless they plan on un-juicing it, which they won't. It's just the new normal. More offense, more viewers, I guess.

If someone has an .800 OPS with help from the ball, which is the ball they will continue to use until they invent a machine that can wind it even tighter, then they have an .800 OPS.

[Dr Naysay]

Interesting Verlander had a whinge about this yesterday and Manfred while acknowledging something must have changed denied it was because of them. Imagine MLB buying Rawlings the ball changing and MLB knowing nothing about it. Verlander called bs and obviously he is right.

Various ball analyses have been done with balls from previous years. We already know from them that the ball is, in fact, completely different.

The newer balls have higher CORs and lower circumferences and seam heights, which would be estimated to add an average of 7.1 feet to their distance, equivalent to the effect we would expect to stem from a 1.43 mph difference in exit speed. Although those differences don’t sound enormous, Nathan has noted that "a tiny change in exit speed can lead to much larger changes in the number of home runs." Last July, he calculated that an exit-speed increase of 1.5 mph would be sufficient to explain the rise in home runs to that point, which means that the 1.43 mph effective difference that Lichtman’s analysis uncovered could comport almost exactly with the initial increase in home runs. Lichtman calculates that a COR increase of this size, in this sample, falls 2.6 standard deviations from the mean, which means that it’s extremely unlikely to have happened by chance.

https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/14/160 ... 5cd21108bc

Initial CT imaging showed that baseballs in the same group had a negligible variation in internal properties. When comparing the new and old groups, however, there was a clear difference in the density of the core. Dr. Law’s team isolated the density difference to the outer (pink) layer of the core, which was, on average, about 40 percent less dense in the new group of balls.

It’s not just that the inside of the ball looks different — the chemical composition of the cores appears to have changed as well. After being tested at the Keck School, the same set of balls were sent to Kent State University. There, researchers at Soumitra Basu’s lab in the Chemistry and Biochemistry department cut open the balls to examine the cores using a thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). This test essentially cooks a material to see which parts parts of it vaporize at which temperatures. Using that information, researchers can create a molecular profile of a given material.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/juiced-baseballs/

[Coeurd’Alene J]

As far as stats go, it doesn't really matter if the ball is juiced... Unless they plan on un-juicing it, which they won't. It's just the new normal. More offense, more viewers, I guess.

If someone has an .800 OPS with help from the ball, which is the ball they will continue to use until they invent a machine that can wind it even tighter, then they have an .800 OPS.

If they changed it this year, You can almost count on the fact that they will change it soon. MLB rarely allows big changes once it’s found the light of day.

[Sibelius Hindemith]

They're messing with the integrity of the game. They'd better fix the situation for the second half of the season because if any HR record, individual or team, gets set this season it will need an asterisk by it.

[Coeurd’Alene J]

My pro b 1 lands upper deck all day long

They can get Titleist to sponsor the ball......

[Dr Naysay]

Commissioner Rob Manfred once again emphatically denied that Major League Baseball has altered baseballs to generate more offense, amid widespread criticism from some of the sport's top pitchers.

"Baseball has done nothing, given no direction for an alteration in the baseball," Manfred told reporters Tuesday. "The flaw in logic is that baseball wants more home runs. If you sat in owners meetings and listen to people on how the game is played, that is not a sentiment among the owners for whom I work."

Manfred also said "there is no evidence from scientists that the ball is harder" but acknowledged that "the drag of the baseball is less."

He said MLB is trying to find out why the drag is less but had not been given answers by scientists.

In June 2018, one month after the study was released, MLB bought Rawlings, the supplier of the official major league ball.