Manfred: Baseballs not juiced, but decreased drag puzzling

By RONALD BLUM
July 9, 2019

CLEVELAND (AP) — Faced with a record onslaught of home runs that has convinced many pitchers that baseballs are juiced, Commissioner Rob Manfred says the sport has been unable to find any changes in the manufacturing process.

A May 2018 report to Major League Baseball by professors specializing in physics, mechanical engineering, statistics and mathematics concluded there was less drag on the ball, causing more home runs. MLB still has not figured out why, and Manfred denied accusations by AL All-Star starter Justin Verlander and other pitchers that baseballs deliberately had been altered.

“Baseball has done nothing, given no direction for an alteration in the baseball,” Manfred told the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on Tuesday. “The biggest flaw in that logic is that baseball somehow wants more home runs. If you sat in an owner’s meeting and listened to people talk about the way our game is being played, that is not the sentiment among the owners for whom I work. There is no desire on the part of ownership to increase the number of home runs in the game. To the contrary, they’re concerned about how many we have.”

Batters have hit 3,691 homers in 1,345 games, on pace for 6,668 over the full season. That would be 19% above last year’s 5,558 and 9% over the record 6,105 hit in 2017 that topped the Steroids Era high mark of 5,693 in 2000.

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