No juiced ball thread ???

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

1 minute ago, juan pantages said:

they should use nerf balls with high seams to even it all out

Let's just go old school, and institute Wiffle ball play,

[Goo Punch 4,275]

9 hours ago, smwhorn said:

I'd much rather see a 3-2 game than a 13-12 game.  

i don't understand how people say things like this in a vacuum, devoid of context. i'm right there with everyone who grew up watching actual baseball and who vehemently prefers that over today's 3TO (3 true outcome) game. But context matters. I'm not trying to watch the Marlins and Mets limp their way to a 3-2 snooze fest. That's infinitely more boring and hard to watch than any game that ends 13-12. So yeah, I agree with the sentiment, but let's not take it so far to where all low scoring games are "real baseball" and automatically better than high scoring games. 

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

5 minutes ago, Goo Punch said:

i don't understand how people say things like this in a vacuum, devoid of context. i'm right there with everyone who grew up watching actual baseball and who vehemently prefers that over today's 3TO (3 true outcome) game. But context matters. I'm not trying to watch the Marlins and Mets limp their way to a 3-2 snooze fest. That's infinitely more boring and hard to watch than any game that ends 13-12. So yeah, I agree with the sentiment, but let's not take it so far to where all low scoring games are "real baseball" and automatically better than high scoring games. 

No, the point was a very good defensive game with great pitching, and clutch hitting is more fun to watch than some slugfest where defense isn't even in play or there are so many errors it's just painful to watch.

[Goo Punch 4,275]

18 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

No, the point was a very good defensive game with great pitching, and clutch hitting is more fun to watch than some slugfest where defense isn't even in play or there are so many errors it's just painful to watch.

that's not what he said. you may be inferring that, but i simply responded to what he actually said. 

Edited July 9, 2019 by Goo Punch

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

2 minutes ago, Goo Punch said:

that's not what he said. you may be inferring that, but i smoky responded to what he said. 

My point is a tight well payed game is more exciting. a 13-12 slug fest usually means little to no defense.

[cmontexas 3,272]

 

I don't think this guy understands what a juiced ball means.

The ball is denser on the inside and bouncier. I can throw a rubber ball from the supermarket faster than a tennis ball, even if they weigh the same 

I guess I should have spelled it out for you

[smwhorn 482]

 

i don't understand how people say things like this in a vacuum, devoid of context. i'm right there with everyone who grew up watching actual baseball and who vehemently prefers that over today's 3TO (3 true outcome) game. But context matters. I'm not trying to watch the Marlins and Mets limp their way to a 3-2 snooze fest. That's infinitely more boring and hard to watch than any game that ends 13-12. So yeah, I agree with the sentiment, but let's not take it so far to where all low scoring games are "real baseball" and automatically better than high scoring games. 

I suppose I could have provided a bit more clarity, but I was responding to and actually quoted a post about a tied low scoring game with a manager using strategy and moving  base runners to win the game.

[Rougarou 594]

But we are in the All-star game in the 5th inning and it's 1-0 with more K's than I've seen all season. 

[Goo Punch 4,275]

17 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

But we are in the All-star game in the 5th inning and it's 1-0 with more K's than I've seen all season. 

well yeah, because every pitcher is an all star who is going 100% for one inning, and even the best hitters in the game are at a disadvantage there. little different during the season when every other night it's 12-8 and every arm you have is overworked and up against it. 

Edited July 10, 2019 by Goo Punch

[freyguy 4,279]

2 hours ago, cmontexas said:

The ball is denser on the inside and bouncier. I can throw a rubber ball from the supermarket faster than a tennis ball, even if they weigh the same 

I guess I should have spelled it out for you

The weight of a baseball is fixed.  So are the dimensions.  What you're trying to go after is collision elasticity.  Velocity & elasticity of both bat & ball all make it happen.

The only data I'm seeing are HRs, and whiny ass pitchers.  Show me trends of average pitcher speed, and average bat speed, over the years.  Then we can do the distance calculations to find out if the elasticity of the ball has changed or not.

[cmontexas 3,272]

12 minutes ago, freyguy said:

The weight of a baseball is fixed.  So are the dimensions.  What you're trying to go after is collision elasticity.  Velocity & elasticity of both bat & ball all make it happen.

 

Im mostly going for velocity. The ball is flying farther off the bat so it stands to reason it flies with greater velocity out of the hand.

The ball can be the exact same size and weight, but how that weight is distributed will affect how the ball travels. The cowhide the ball is wrapped in (or whatever they use) is lighter than it used to be, so in order to get the ball to spec weight they add a couple grams of weight to the core. Same dimensions, same weight, ball will fly different

[jimmyjazz 45,992]

Wait, you're saying that two balls of identical size, with identical mass and identical surface finish will come off the hand at different velocities, depending on how that mass is distributed?  That doesn't make any sense.  The ball will come off the hand at the hand's linear velocity.  If the pitcher is strong enough to get his hand moving 100 mph throwing a bowling ball, that's how fast the bowling ball will be going at the start of its flight.

In flight, a lower-seamed design would probably have a lower drag coefficient than an older ball with more pronounced seams, and would thus suffer lower drag losses and not slow down as much.

When today's baseball makes contact with the bat, if for some reason the design changes result in reduced energy loss during rebound, then yes, it will fly off the bat faster.

Sorting out all these details is probably not something MLB cares to do.  I suspect they made intentional design changes and tested them to see if they had the expected effect, and tweaked from there.  Or, it's all a happy (unhappy?) accident at the manufacturing plant.  Something's different, though.

[Hank Chinaski 6,315]

13 hours ago, freyguy said:

The weight of a baseball is fixed.  So are the dimensions.  What you're trying to go after is collision elasticity.  Velocity & elasticity of both bat & ball all make it happen.

The only data I'm seeing are HRs, and whiny ass pitchers.  Show me trends of average pitcher speed, and average bat speed, over the years.  Then we can do the distance calculations to find out if the elasticity of the ball has changed or not.

Different groups have examined the balls...there are differences:

https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/14/16044264/2017-mlb-home-run-spike-juiced-ball-testing-reveal-155cd21108bc

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2018/05/24/mlb-finally-admits-changes-to-ball-itself-fueled-home-run-spike-but-doesnt-say-how-or-why/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fd306fec8539

The circumstantial evidence is strong too: the AAA HR spike this year (the first year they've used the same balls as MLB), the spike in the number of fly balls that are HR (meaning it's not just that guys are hitting the ball in the air more frequently), etc. These immediate and dramatic league-wide trends strongly suggest that it isn't about gradual biomechanical improvements that players are making. 

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

Holy Jeebus, the ball is juiced to make more HR's, to get more asses in the seats, to make more money.

Next topic: why does a $6 beer cost $12 at an MLB game ?

[UTexasFight 9,512]

Angry old managers yell at Verlander:

Stark:

CLEVELAND — Before he got the call to start the All-Star Game, Justin Verlander got another call — right into the principal’s office.

Waiting for him in that office Monday afternoon wasn’t an actual principal, or even the actual commissioner, Rob Manfred. But when Manfred’s favorite lieutenants — Joe Torre, Jim Leyland and at least one other MLB official — decided it was time to stop by the clubhouse for a visit, it was safe to guess they weren’t bringing along scrapbooks to reminisce about the 2012 ALCS.

“I may actually have facilitated that meeting,” Verlander’s Astros teammate, Gerrit Cole, admitted Tuesday night after the American League finished off the National League, 4-3, in the All-Star Game. “I saw Jim and Joe were in (manager Alex Cora’s) office. And they said hi. Then Jim, in not a profanity-laden way, said, ‘Get Justin in here right now.’ So I came out and said, ‘Hey, Skip wants to see you.’ And he said, ‘OK.’ Then he comes back and he goes, ‘Man, I just got chewed out.’”

In case you’re not familiar with hallowed All-Star Game tradition, it isn’t every year the starting pitcher gets summoned to the manager’s office to get chewed out by the powers that be. No, to pull that off, it takes creativity.

Or, in Verlander’s case, it took using the stage provided by the annual pre-All-Star press conference as the inspirational occasion to accuse Major League Baseball of buying Rawlings, the company that makes the baseballs, so it could intentionally juice the ball.

“If any other $40 billion company bought out a $400 million company and the product changed dramatically,” Verlander told ESPN, “it’s not a guess as to what happened. We all know what happened. Manfred, the first time he came in, what’d he say? He said we want more offense. All of a sudden he comes in, the balls are juiced? It’s not coincidence. We’re not idiots.”

Here in the media biz, we love Verlander for his refreshing penchant for delivering blistering opinions with the same ferocity he’s been delivering 98-mile-an-hour smokeballs for the last 15 seasons. But over in the run-the-sport business so lovingly presided over by the commissioner, those blistering opinions apparently aren’t always quite so popular. Who knew!

So Torre, Leyland and their friends delivered a slightly different take — which, from what we can gather, went something like, “We love you, Justin. You just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Manfred wouldn’t comment on Verlander directly Tuesday afternoon during his annual visit to the July meeting of the Baseball Writers Association of America. But he might as well have been reading a text message to his favorite All-Star starter when he said, “Baseball has done nothing, given no direction, for an alteration of the baseball.”

We’ll spare you all the details and rationalizations here. But we should at least mention Manfred seemed to find it mildly amusing that anyone — from Cy Young winners to talk-show hosts — would think it was his secret lifelong dream to rescue his sport by blowing up every home run record known to mankind.

“There is no desire on our part to increase the number of home runs,” Manfred said. “On the contrary, we’re concerned about how many we have.”

Is the ball different? It’s obviously different. To his credit, Manfred made no attempt to dispute that Tuesday. But how? Why? What does it all mean? The commissioner seemed genuinely confused himself — and promised his team of independent scientists was delving fervently into all those questions at this very moment. So there? Feel better and less conspiratorial now? Beautiful.

There’s an excellent chance, therefore, that and several other pithy messages were hand-delivered to Verlander by his special clubhouse visitors Monday. So, after he’d spun off an enjoyable 1-2-3, two-strikeout first inning in his first All-Star start since 2012, Verlander was asked a question he had to know was coming.

Has his opinion about the baseball changed since Monday?

Verlander smiled, took a deep breath, bounced his thoughts around his brain for a second, then replied, carefully, “Good question.” He paused and smiled again. “I think I need to dig a little further.”

Was it true he’d spoken to his friends at Major League Baseball since we’d heard from him last?

“Uh, yes,” he said, succinctly, again choosing his words meticulously.

Could he describe that conversation in any way?

“No. No,” he said. “Don’t need to.”

Nevertheless, he admitted he’d heard Manfred’s public response early in the day. Finally, he was asked where he wants it all to go from here.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Like I said, those decisions are above my head. It’s just one of those things. If they want to reduce the drag on the ball or put it back the way it was, then we can work together, obviously. I’ve got some input. But you know, I’ve thrown a lot of different baseballs in my career. And I actually talked to some guys yesterday … and they said they’d welcome hearing some of my opinions. So I’m all aboard.”

By “some guys,” he presumably meant “some guys in the commissioner’s office.” But even if he didn’t, let’s think about the rest of those remarks. We have no idea whether Manfred and his team would really “welcome” hearing more of Verlander’s opinions on this topic. But here’s what we think:

They should. And they should start tomorrow.

Most kids who get called to the principal’s office don’t emerge as valued members of the Blue Ribbon Committee on Unruly Classroom Behavior. But if that’s what happens in this case, some legitimate good could even come from all of this — because this is a man whose passion for the game he plays is beyond question, even if his theories on what’s at work here might not be born out by the actual facts.

“And he’s also an expert,” Cole said. “He’s pitched in this league for a decade and a half. And he’s thrown about 3,500 pitches each year. So if anybody’s going to be an expert on the baseball, it’s probably going to be a guy that’s done that.”

Verlander has thrown 47,251 pitches in his career, according to Baseball Reference. That doesn’t even count spring training, postseason or All-Star games. Think of how many baseballs he has held in his hand. Why wouldn’t baseball care about his opinion on what those baseballs feel like now versus what they felt like five, 10 and 15 years ago? When we ran that idea past other All-Star pitchers Tuesday night, they were all in.

“He had strong feelings, and I appreciate that,” said the Twins’ Jake Odorizzi. “Look, as pitchers, it’s no secret we want the balls to be as least-flying as possible, the most anti-aerodynamic thing in the world. I’m no scientist. I’m not anything like that. But it seems like there’s been some adjustments. So I think the way he put it out there is the way a lot of guys view it.

“He’s on his way to a Hall of Fame career. He’s been pitching a number of years. And he’s been through a lot of games and a lot of seasons. So I feel like he’s pretty qualified to be talking on things like that.”

And you know what? That’s the truth. Who’s more qualified to help “fix” the baseball than the people who throw them? So why stop with just looping in Verlander? What’s the downside to baseball appointing a special advisory committee of veteran pitchers who could help balance the science with real, live game experience?

Let’s go there. Let’s do this. Let’s solve these problems together instead of shooting conspiracy theories into the All-Star ozone. Everything is better when there’s partnership and cooperation. So what better place to try that than the quest to “fix” the baseball?

“Look, everybody’s fine about it,” Odorizzi said. “They just want to know what it is. That’s really all we want.”

And guess what? That’s really all Verlander wants, too.

[hookem48 4,701]

23 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Holy Jeebus, the ball is juiced to make more HR's, to get more asses in the seats, to make more money.

Next topic: why does a $6 beer cost $12 at an MLB game ?

we'd have to know the dimensions and mass before we can answer that.

[Huckleberry 33,037]

3 minutes ago, hookem48 said:

we'd have to know the dimensions and mass before we can answer that.

 

[freyguy 4,279]

5 hours ago, hookem48 said:

we'd have to know the dimensions and mass before we can answer that.

[Goo Punch 4,275]

the balls are totally juiced. i keep seeing batted balls where i go "that's a double in the gap" or what's worse, "that's a routine fly out", and then 3 seconds later the ball leaves the yard. it's dumb. here's two examples from yesterday where when i saw the ball leave the bat i was not thinking HR. I'm sure there are dozens of better examples, but these are simply recent ones:

 

 

[smwhorn 482]

Lindor's one handed HR.

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/07/francisco-lindor-indians-home-run-swing-video-juiced-baseballs-mlb-balls-reaction?fbclid=IwAR1CfoIjf-5tgUo4EbuaoJxKhH7iFTkG3hxRRoDXgu724QIgkiUaiJr7dCM

Don't really know a whole lot about Lindor and don't know if he's done this before, but thought I'd add the article to the discussion.

[Goo Punch 4,275]

Christian Yelich is a great hitter, but he is not someone who ever really crushes the ball. He just hit one into the Allegheny. Normally that's a distinction reserved for guys built like Josh Bell. I mean he got good wood on this ball, but to splash it? Nah. 

 

 

[smwhorn 482]

15 hours ago, Goo Punch said:

Christian Yelich is a great hitter, but he is not someone who ever really crushes the ball. He just hit one into the Allegheny. Normally that's a distinction reserved for guys built like Josh Bell. I mean he got good wood on this ball, but to splash it? Nah. 

 

 

That's a good point actually.  I'm wondering (but too lazy to look it up even though I started the thread) if there are stats for average distance of the HRs this season vs. previous seasons.  If you have the same guys hitting balls farther this year than in others, that I think helps support the conspiracy theory.

[Goo Punch 4,275]

plus it was an 86 mph breaking ball, and not some 101 mph 4-seamer that provided all the power for him. i doubt Yelich has ever hit a ball like that before this year. 

[Beau Vine 54,292]

If a Mariner pitcher throw a strike that Trout swings at, you might as well assume it's going out.  

[smwhorn 482]

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/27327049/the-20-most-amazing-astounding-facts-year-home-run

didn't see this posted yet . . .

[SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3,861]

 

 

 

[Goo Punch 4,275]

the kid from the Reds keeps making contact that looks like a weak fly to the opposite field, only to watch the OF not even move as the ball goes 430 feet. it's really fucking stupid and frankly annoying at this point how after a lifetime of watching baseball, we've gone from routinely seeing contact that looks like a HR but ends up being a deep fly, to now routinely seeing contact that looks like a weak pop out that's leaving the yard in a hurry, and it's happened overnight. I'd rather have everyone in the league be on steroids than this shit.

Edited August 13, 2019 by Goo Punch

[miguelito 11,266]

Someone with skills should make a video of a guy attempting to bunt, then showing a ball landing in McCovey Cove.  I would chuckle at that.

Or a guy getting beaned, and the ball lands in the cheap seats.

[Beau Vine 54,292]

 

[Goo Punch 4,275]

i've spent my entire life watching i don't know how many thousands of games of baseball, and you cannot tell me that this pitch + this swing should equal a fucking opposite field yack off the scoreboard for chrissakes. he didn't even get all of it, and in fact he got under it some, and it still went like 440' the other way.

edit: scroll right for the broadcast view

 

it's just fucking ridiculous man. Barry Bonds would literally hit 85 HR with 200 IBB if he played under today's conditions. 

Edited August 26, 2019 by Goo Punch

[UpperWestside 6,171]

On 7/10/2019 at 2:01 PM, Onboard 2.0 said:

Holy Jeebus, the ball is juiced to make more HR's, to get more asses in the seats, to make more money.

Next topic: why does a $6 beer cost $12 at an MLB game ?

I don't drink beer, but seeing someone have to pay 15 for a tallboy in the Bronx is nuts. At least they allow you to bring in cokes or water if it is unopened and you can bring snacks in as well. But holy hell the beer prices are ridiculous.