The talk this season has been that the baseball is wound tighter, resulting in all the home runs we’ve experienced. Personally, I think it’s more a result of expansion watering down the pitching, and more juicy opportunities arising for McGwire, Sosa, Piazza et al. Good hitting will always triumph over less-than-good pitching.
But the juiced-ball argument persists. So here’s my question. How much, in actual numbers, do you gain from a juiced ball? Can you hit it 40 feet further? Fifty feet?
In Tuesday’s game, Mike Piazza hit a grand slam in Toronto that would have gone out if he had been hitting a mouse wrapped in wet socks. And I’ve seen plenty of other homers that left no doubt. Maybe they were more impressive because of increased distance, but they would have been home runs anywhere.
So, how many doubles or warning track outs has the juiced ball supposedly turned into home runs?
Whether or not the ball is juiced (and i think it is) is rather irrelevant. The facts speak for themselves… even crappy shortstops are now hitting 25 hrs/year. The offensive explosion in baseball can be attributed to many factors:
miniscule strike zone (coupled with umpires calling strikes even though the ball is thrown 6 inches outside the plate)
beefed-up batters
shoebox parks being built these days
juiced ball
In any event, today’s baseball is not your father’s baseball. The fact that pitchers have so many obstacles has resulted in a game which now resembles slow-pitch softball. Speed and defense are now irrelevent. Attempting a stolen base is now a waste of time. Now, when you get on base, it’s no longer important to get to 2nd to be in a run-scoring situation. You just plant your ass on first and wait for the next home run. Ozzie Smith in his prime would not stand a chance in what is now called major league baseball.
Defensive ability means nothing now… Give up a bunch of errors, so what. as long as you can jack the ball, all’s well.
Baseball’s beauty over the years has been its ability to adapt. In the late 60s pitching dominated, and the mound was lowered. the dh was introduced. What the game needs now is a return to speed, defense, and the ability of a manager to influence the game.
Today, there is no more balance. Games are now home-run derbies. And don’t get me started on the abortion known as coors field.
Ack. sorry for the rant. The “juiced ball” according to most pitchers, is a ball wound tightly. This impedes their ability to grip/manipulate the ball by the seams, and the lack of raised seams makes it difficult to create movement on the ball. I don’t think it makes it travel further once hit, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to hit in the first place.
I agree that pitching has been the problem of pretty much every team this season. As for whether I buy the juiced ball thing, well…
Let’s say it’s a combination of tighter balls (no comment :D) and poor pitching that has resulted in the increase in home runs. The tighter balls are likely to be evenly (randomly) distributed throughout each teams’ games (or so ESPN sez). If this is the case, then shouldn’t we see a proportional increase in EVERYONE’S HRs? If Andres Galarraga is hitting 20 percent more dingers this season than last season (yes, I know he was out, but play along with me), then shouldn’t Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, and Vladimir Guererro also be hitting about 20 percent more? I know that a lot of factors affect hitting, but sheesh, it’s not happening.
I’m curious about the HRs by players who aren’t known for their HRs. Are their numbers up? I don’t have my sports page handy, so I don’t know any current player stats.
I remeber watching the espn anaysts talking about the home run explosion. Then they started showing the pitch locations of a lot of the home runs. In almost every case, the ball was belt-high or higher. This leads me to suspect the pitching.
Remember, not all pitchers are giving up a lot of gopher balls. Randy and Pedro still keep the ball down in the strike zone and it stays in the park. And it helps if brush back the hitter every now and then.
And ZUMA makes a good point about the strike zone. It varies considerably from ump to ump, and sometimes batter to batter. When a pitcher isn’t getting the close calls he used to get (which seems to be happening more) and falls behind the hitter, he pretty much has to throw a fastball. The hitter knows this and sits on that pitch, giving him an advantage
…strikeout totals are way up. A lot of guys are swinging harder in case they hit the ball. They may hit it less, but it goes further.
Remember, a 3% increase in distance and all those balls caught on the track last year go out.
Also, more batters are going to whippier, thinner handled bats to generate bat speed. Drawback? See the number of broken bats going up each year? Even the long time pros who aren't used to the aluminum in college that doesn't break.
I gotta admit, it seems HRs, traveling the same distance they went in the past, seem to bounce higher this year, going into the stands standing high behind fences on 1 hop (see Toronto).
Of course, expansion helps (and the expansion hitters help Pedro, Randy, et al), weightlifting, and only protecting postage-stamp zones. The parks not as much - watch Maris' #61 - the OF is in front of a 342 mark, and he isn't on the line. (note: there are some extreme parks - Ten-Run field (Hou), Coors) There are some extremes in the past, too - see Ott's H/A HR split.
The ball is juicier. The parks are smaller. These arguments I buy.
Watered-down pitching talent? Not so much. My homeys, the Atlanta Braves, have the best pitching staff in MLB, certainly the equal of many pre-juiced-ball teams, but that hasn’t made them immune to games with combined run counts in the teens and twenties.
Also, there are more hits than just home runs. If pitching were part of the phenomenon (I stop short of calling it a “problem”), wouldn’t the number of overall hits be rising too? Wouldn’t we see the return of the .400 hitter?
I believe a major part of the home run explosion is the “high strike”.Umpires are not calling letter high pitches strikes,consistantly.Tom Seaver said in an interview,that he’d have a hard time today because his “out” pitch was a high,tight,fastball.Al Leiter said that he’s had to stay away from the inside of the plate,because the umps don’t call inside pitches strikes anymore.
We are seeing the return of the .400 hitter. Through this past week, Nomar Garciaparra has been flirting with the .400 mark, actually going over it a few days ago. There are some NLers pretty damn close to the mark as well.
However, I have to give you props for being a fellow Braves fan. Don’t you just love steady, good pitching?
This is only a partial answer, but I took a quick look at some numbers from the 1990 and 1999 seasons. The first column is the number of HR hit by the top five home run hitters in the league, the second is the total homeruns hit in the league, the third identifies the league and year, and the fourth says how many teams were in the league.
193 1796 AL '90 14
178 1521 NL '90 12
225 2635 AL '99 14
260 2893 NL '99 16
The increase in homers hit by the league leaders is about 17% in the AL, 46% in the NL. The increase in the number of homers hit per team is about 47% in both leagues.
Quick answer (off of VERY limited evidence) – the explosion in homeruns is affecting everyone, not just the McGwires and Galaragas.
Considering I wrote my first post at oh, 2:30am, I’m just glad it was coherent, much less was a decent contribution to this discussion.
Okay, so the explosion in HRs basically comes down to the following factors:
Sucky pitching
Inconsistent/highly varying strike zones
Variance in ballpark dimensions
Juiced balls
Bigger batters
Different bats
I’m not too sure about #5, though. I can’t think of any players offhand who have noticeably bulked up in the last season or two. And even if they did, I don’t think it would automatically translate into them hitting more HRs. Ya still gotta work on your hitting.
iampunha and Five- Barbeque at my house Friday! We can watch the Braves-Mets game!
I think it might have something to do with the pitching, but not because of expansion. Too many good, young pitchers are getting hurt because they’re coddled too much in the minor leagues and then expected to throw a much larger number of innings than they’re acustumed to when they reach the majors. Look at Kerry Wood, or almost any young pitcher from the Cardinals in the past few years.
I think most people would trace the offensive explosion a bit further back than that. Most of it seemed to come in '95 or '96, but you find a pretty odd outcropping of heavy HR back as far as '87
The “bigger players” arguments I have heard have tended to be more like:
“Lots of players are working out now, in a way the players of 10 or 20 years ago never did.”
then:
“Joe Slobotnik hit the weights hard all winter, and boy is he crushing the ball.”
although that may just reflect the kind of analysis I am more likely to hear or see.
I have also read/heard reports that some of the “juice” in the ball may be the stitching.
Supposedly, they are using a tighter, thinner thread for the stitching on big league baseballs these days. While the difference might not be noticible to the naked eye, the drag in the air of the thicker threaded balls made Bob Gibson’s curve ball and slider easier for him to throw. Or so “they” claim.
I think expansion and player conditioning have a lot to do with it.
But the main culprit has to be the strike zone. If the MLB umps called the strike that way it was defined in the rule book, home run production would drop like a lead shot.
Thanks for your input, folks. I knew I’d get a myriad of opinions from a baseball thread.
However, my original question was something more along the lines of ‘do you think the juiced ball has made home runs out of what would otherwise have been doubles or even outs?’
Like I said, I’ve seen plenty of home runs this year that would have been gone even if they used one of the balls from Mathewson’s era. Certainly Piazza’s grand slam in Toronto didn’t need any help.
If there are juiced balls, then probably yes. But it’d be hard to find evidence for it. We’d have to do a per-stadium study- Coors Field, Turner Field, Jacobs Field, etc.- and see if at each field there were increases in doubles, triples, etc. If yes, and if yes at a good percentage of the parks, then I think yes, you could conclude that the juiced ball has done wonders for offense.
Also, just a sudden thought: if juiced balls fly farther off a bat, then shouldn’t juiced balls also be thrown faster by a pitcher?
SoxFan, increased drag would result in more rotation, thus more movement. BTW, the Blue Jays were accusing Mets RP Dennis Cook of trying to raise those seams this week. Flat seams or thin air reduce the movement - thta’s why Kile got killed in Denver - it flattened his curve, then they flattened him.
Five,
Even the Braves don’t have the depth teams had several years ago. The talent pool is stretched too thin. More than other teams today? Yes. More than some of the staffs from say the Dodgers or Orioles of the 70s? No.
Ajuiced ball won’t go faster when thrown. A tighter-wrapped ball has a more efficient transfer of energy to the ball from the bat. The pitcher, having a longer range of motion to transfer energy to the ball, isn’t helped, but the moemntary contact fo the ball and bat is enhanced. Plus, the faster the ball comes in, the faster it leaves the bat. On the rare occasion someone gets to Randy Johnson, look how far it goes. Didn’t Mac hit one like 540 against him last year? Hit an old softball sometime - hit it even slightly off-center and much of your energy is spent deforming the ball (it “eggs out”) rather than propelling it.
