BALLS OVER THE WALL

For decades, the baseball’s effect on the game was one of the great conspiracy theories that baseball fans loved to debate. There was plenty of discussion but little data.

There was the weird home run blip in 1987, when home runs were hit in bunches only to go back to “normal” in 1988. But for years, any rumored tweaks to the baseball were treated much in the same way as corked bats, stolen signs and spitballs in the nebulous world of speculation.

In 2019, we no longer are left to speculate as to whether a tweak to the baseball makes a major impact on the game, The data is there and we have multiple examples of