You might have seen this insane Triple-A box score from the other day. Some highlights from a game in which the Reno Aces clubbed the Tacoma Rainiers 25-8, collecting 25 hits and eight walks along the way:
• Kevin Cron reached base five times, scored five runs and drove in six more. He didn't have the best day among the Aces.
• That's because Yasmany Tomas hit four home runs. He had five hits, 17 total bases and eight RBIs.
• Not to be outdone: Matt Szczur hit for the cycle.
This was an extreme game, to be sure, but it reflects an offensive explosion at the Triple-A level. In the International League, runs per game have increased 25 percent over last season and homers are up 34 percent. Similarly, the Pacific Coast League has seen leaps of 14 percent in runs and 35 percent in homers.
What in tarnation is going on here? Well, if the alleged truism in politics is "It's the economy, stupid," perhaps the analogous saying in baseball ought to be "It's the ball, stupid."
Late last season, at the request of Major League Baseball, it was decided that the Triple-A leagues would use the same balls as MLB. As Baseball America's J.J. Cooper predicted in the linked story months ago, it was thought scoring and homers would increase. Boy, have they.
Baseballs used at the big league level have always been of higher quality than the ones used in the minors. For the past few years, that has primarily meant that the balls used by the Dodgers and Cubs are a lot livelier than the ones used by the IronPigs and the Baby Cakes. Now both levels are using the high-quality rabbit balls, but that leaves a disparity between the two highest levels and those below. It's a strange dynamic.
Last year, baseball tasked a committee to study the possible causes of the heightened homer rates of recent seasons. The conclusion, to put it bluntly, was that, yes, it's the ball, stupid. Of course, the reality is infinitely more nuanced than that.
This year, even as we labored through a cold early spring in many Northern and Eastern cities, home run rates spiked once again in the early going, returning to the record levels of the 2017 season. Physics-literate analysts such as Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus were quick to note that, once again, something was amiss with this year's supply of baseballs. Through Wednesday's games, big league teams were averaging 1.31 homers per game, up from 2017's mark of 1.26, which established a record.
It sure feels like there have been a dizzying number of significant changes in how baseball has been played the past few years, a rate of change consistent with other human endeavors affected by the lighting speed of innovation in the tech sector. These things are almost certainly all related, leading to trends that leave many of us wondering if baseball's future could become too disconnected with its past.
As things change and evolve in ways largely out of the control of baseball's overlords, you would think that, at the very least, they could keep the ball the same. Alas, the ball is different. But it's not different in the right way.
There is a sense that baseball is a great ostrich with its proverbial head buried in metaphorical sand when it comes to these issues. Perhaps, to a certain extent, that was once the case. However, beginning with that aforementioned ball committee report, that's no longer the case.
A couple of things have changed since then. First, even before that report was released, baseball introduced storage protocols so that game balls would be consistent from venue to venue, a policy stemming from the use of humidors in Arizona and Colorado. Then there was the switch to big league baseballs in Triple-A, which gives some uniformity to the proceedings for scouts and teams judging players at that level, and for big league players who spend time there in rehab stints.
Finally, MLB acquired an equity stake in the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company last year, with league officer Chris Marinak saying at the time, "We are particularly interested in providing even more input and direction on the production of the official ball of Major League Baseball."
If you read between the lines of Marinak's words, there are a couple of hopeful signs there. One is that baseball is striving to ensure the highest-possible degree of uniformity of game balls. Even more important: You can read that statement as evidence baseball will take an active stance in tweaking how baseballs perform. That part is crucial.
The other day, writer Bill James responded to a reader question by stating, among other things, "My argument would still be that if the resiliency of the baseballs has not changed, WHY HAVEN'T YOU CHANGED IT?"
This, dear readers, is a notion I've been kicking around for months, albeit mostly unaware that this is a road that baseball may have already started down. Is a possible solution to the seeming imbalance that big league baseball has fallen into simply to change the ball to behave the way we want it to?
It's a big question and one that is perhaps appropriate to ask right now, in the year 2019, the 100th big league season of the live ball era. I've already suggested my answer: If we can bring the game back into balance by changing the specifications of the ball, then heck yeah we should do it.
The first thing we'd have to do is reach some kind of consensus of what balance even means. It's easy to describe it subjectively. We want enough of all the things, but not too many of any of them. We want home runs, but not so many that they lose their allure. We want strikeouts, but not so many that games take on the air of a whiffle ball encounter. We want runs, but not so many that games take even longer than they take to complete now.
I would argue that these things can all be quantified. There are a lot of approaches you could take, but here's just one. First, I took all 99 seasons of the live ball era before this one, then eliminated the top 20 percent of seasons by runs per game, and the bottom 20 percent. What's left are the seasons most balanced in terms of that number.
Then I simply averaged a few categories from the remaining seasons:
• Runs per game: 4.49
• Homers per game: 0.87
• Steals per game: 0.56
• Slash line: .262/.329/.399
• Strikeouts/walks: 5.61/3.30
That strikeout number (5.61) sounds kind of dreamy, but it's hard to imagine that category retreating to that mark. But we can hope. Anyway, this is one definition of what a "balanced" season might look like. To put that into context, I created similarity scores for every season since 1920, comparing rates of runs, hits, steals, homers, strikeouts and walks to the target averages.
Here are the five seasons of "ideal" balance: 1. 1993; 2. 1990; 3. 1962; 4. 1985; 5. 1991. In 1993, the collective slash line was .265/.332/.403. Teams averaged 0.89 homers per game, 0.72 steals, 5.8 strikeouts and 3.3 walks per game. We want to make every season look as much like 1993 as possible.
So what kinds of things could we do with the ball to make this happen? Here is me floating a few trial balloons:
1. A tightly controlled drag coefficient to achieve a desired rate of homers per fly ball.
2. Carefully monitored humidors to achieve uniform storage protocols, adjusted for elevation, with balls targeted to perform within a specified range of exit velocity.
3. Keep the seam heights and width at levels that balance movement on breaking pitches with air resistance off the bat.
4. Make sure "rub-down" procedures emphasize the pitcher's ability to grip the ball (for safety reasons).
There are almost certainly 100 other specifications that could be introduced. Needless to say, the testing that would go into balls altered to meet such targets would have to be extensive. (Hello, Atlantic League!) The possibility for unintended consequences is harrowing.
However, if balls are calibrated so that homers per game occur at a balanced rate (0.87 rather than this season's 1.31), then the ability to create runs on balls in play becomes more important. With fewer batters swinging for the fences, perhaps strikeouts fall. In theory.
The risk is that pitchers come to dominate even more than they do now. This is where attempts to influence spin rate come into play. Hitters like to brag that raw velocity doesn't worry them. Well, pitchers have honed the spin and movement on their pitches, which plays off the velocity. Spin, when it comes to the swing-and-miss, is huge. Every little thing you can do to limit it has outsized effects.
A drama about seam height has played out at the college level over the past few years. Back in 2011, the NCAA instituted regulations regarding the performance of bats, partly to mitigate rampant scoring and homers, but also as a safety issue because of the speed with which the ball rocketed off aluminum.
During the first season after the change, scoring in college baseball dropped from 6.98 to 5.58 runs per game, and the rate of homers plummeted from 0.94 to 0.52. In 2014, the numbers were 5.08 runs and 0.39 homers. Suddenly, college baseball faced a crisis of offense.
What could it do? It's the ball, stupid. The NCAA went to flat-seam baseballs beginning with the 2015 campaign. Scoring and homers rebounded, but not to the stratospheric levels before the bats were deadened. As the homer returned to the college game, so too did the whiffs. In 2017, strikeouts per game were up 1.06 over 2014.
I have no idea whether or not those who oversee college baseball are happy with where their game is at now, but it sure looks better balanced than it did either before the bat regulations or before the change in the ball.
So will big league baseball regain balance by fixing the ball? Maybe. It just has to figure out how to do it.
As I thought through these issues, I reached out to Alan Nathan, a physics professor at the University of Illinois and probably the most respected authority on the physics of baseball and a member of last year's committee that studied the effects on the ball.
Nathan began by emphasizing a couple of important insights from the report. First, the report confirmed that issues with the ball were indeed spurring home run rates, and that effect was related to the drag coefficient of the ball (basically, the resistance a ball has to the air it travels through -- the lower the rate of drag, the farther it will fly). However, the rate of change in drag coefficient needed to explain the change is very small.
In fact, the spread of drag coefficient values within a supply of baseballs is larger than the level needed to explain the home run surge. In other words, while it's true that balls in a general sense are flying farther than they once did, the variance between then and now is smaller than it is among the many balls in circulation at present. This, in part, could be an explanation for why balls could easily meet all the current specifications and still behave differently from a previous supply of baseballs. And within that supply, balls will behave differently from each other.
Fine. We know that unintentional and minuscule differences between baseballs can have large effects on the game we see on the field. All we need to do is iron out those differences and then make intentional changes.
One problem with that, per Nathan: "As yet, we have no explanation for [these effects]. Whatever property of the baseball leads to such a large spread of [drag coefficient] values must be very subtle or else we would have found it by now."
There are some convincing theories out there, such as this one from Meredith Wills, an astrophysicist writing for The Athletic. She points to a difference in the size of the laces as the culprit and offers some theories on the consequences of that finding.
Rest assured, though, there is hard work being done on understanding the baseballs in use, the materials they contain, and what they do after all of those materials are combined into what we know as the hardball. Knowledge, as it always does, leads to wonderful new options. And all of the knowledge we do have is pretty new.
"Prior to our committee work, [drag coefficient] was not really on anyone's radar screen," Nathan wrote. "In particular, it was not measured, nor was it regulated by MLB or Rawlings. That will change once we get all the issues figured out."
And when they figure it out, perhaps for the first time ever, baseball can possibly -- on purpose -- change the ball to help restore some of the balance the game has lost. That would not be stupid.
Extra Innings
Recently, a little-noticed anniversary passed: On May 17, 1970, Hank Aaron became the ninth player to reach 3,000 hits but the first to do so with 500 home runs also on the board. He since has been joined in the 3,000/500 club by Willie Mays, Eddie Murray, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like so much attention has been paid to Aaron's home run record over the years that we lose sight of just how good of an overall hitter he was, and for how long he was good. Aaron had 3,016 hits in his career that weren't homers.
For the heck of it, I decided to create a list of the best homer/hit combos in baseball history. I calculated the harmonic mean between the career totals of these numbers to do it. What's it mean? Nothing. But it's a list, and it's another list that Hank Aaron gets to be on top of, so let's run with it.
These are all the players with a harmonic mean of homers and hits of 1,000 or more:
1. Hank Aaron 1,208 (3,771 hits, 755 homers)
2. Barry Bonds 1,128 (2,935 hits, 762 homers)
3. Alex Rodriguez 1,081 (3,115 hits, 696 homers)
4. Babe Ruth 1,073 (2,873, 714 homers)
5. Willie Mays 1,055 (3,283 hits, 660 homers)
6. Albert Pujols 1,018 (3,117 hits, 641 homers)
• This Gleyber Torres versus the Orioles stuff is nuts. Quick recap: To date, Torres has played 12 games against Baltimore, 11 of them starts. He's hitting .465/.540/1.233 over 50 plate appearances with 10 home runs (10!), 13 RBIs and 16 runs scored. Baltimore's pitching staff isn't, you know, good ... but still.
Torres will get six more cracks against the Baltimore staff, unless he's hurt or unless Aaron Boone leaves him out of the starting lineup like he did on Thursday. (Boone, what are you doing?!) For now, let's freeze Torres' numbers against Baltimore where they are. If the season ended today, would this be the greatest domination by a hitter against a single opponent in a season?
Maybe, but there is plenty of competition. Using the Baseball-Reference.com split finder, I generated a list of every hitter who has slugged at least 1.000 against an opponent in a team over at least 50 plate appearances. The data is mostly complete back to 1908, and there have been 67 such occurrences.
Only two other hitters, in addition to Torres, have pushed their single-season slugging against an opponent over 1.200. The Gleyber Club includes David Justice, who slugged 1.211 against the A's in 1997 (no wonder Billy Beane acquired him a few years later), and Willie Stargell, who slugged 1.205 against the Braves in 1971.
You shouldn't really be able to go by the raw number of homers, because teams used to play each of their league opponents 22 times per season. However, while the leaderboard is dominated by that era, those atop it didn't play 22 times against the opponents they mashed. That gives Torres a shot at the mark, which is 13.
Homers against one opponent in a season
Hank Sauer, 13 (vs. Pirates, 1954, 19 games)
Joe Adcock, 13 (vs. Dodgers, 1958, 17 games)
Roger Maris, 13 (vs. White Sox, 1961, 18 games)