Major League Baseball has been trying to find the right kind of balls to help balance the struggle between pitchers and batters.
A few years ago, the league drew criticism for balls that flew off of bats too well and made things unfair for pitchers. Enough so that then-Cubs manager Joe Maddon joked that they should just put “Ping” on the side of each one.
But in 2022, baseball has the opposite problem. Through the first three weeks of the season, the balls seem to be so dead that even pitchers are griping about them. Not because batters can’t hit them over the fence as easily, but because they are more dangerous to throw.
"It's extremely annoying to see your teammates constantly get hit, and if you get hit by certain pitches it is what it is, but to get hit in the head the amount that we're getting hit is unbelievable," Mets starter Chris Bassitt said. "I had some close calls tonight, and I've been hit in the face [by a line drive] and I don't want to do that to anybody ever, but MLB has a very big problem with the baseballs. They're bad. Everyone in the league knows it. Every pitcher knows it. They're bad.
"They don't care. MLB doesn't give a damn about it. They don't care. We've told them our problems with them, and they don't care."
Bassitt is the first to speak publicly, but there are rumblings that he is not the only pitcher who feels this way.
Less serious than the danger is the noticeable decline in offensive production around the league. Home run numbers are down, and if that happens while batters are still getting hits otherwise, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But if no one is hitting anything, then it’s an issue.
At this point in the season, there’s no question that the new balls have had an impact on power. In Tuesday night’s White Sox-Royals game, for instance, Sox third baseman Jake Burger hit a fly ball to left that left his bat at 106 miles per hour and had an expected batting average of .850 and projected distance over 400 feet. Under typical circumstances, it’s a home run. Instead, he few out to left field.
“Yeah, 100 percent,” Burger said when asked if he thought he’d gotten all of that one. “I looked at the projected and it was 106 and 34 degrees and I think it was projected 403 feet, which would have made it a tie ballgame. It went 360 so you know it is what it is. That’s part of being a Northern team. You have to expect that in April. It is what it is. You just have to find other ways to scrape across runs.”
The problem is, if teams are not finding other ways to scrape across runs, then the league cannot stick with the balls currently in use.
Some of the issues batters are having could be coming from the annual problem of bad April weather, and as much as the shortened spring training has hampered pitchers, it is having an effect on hitters too.
“I thought it was good in the sense that we were able to hit the ground running, like there was no tip-toeing around, we’re getting right to it,” Cubs third baseman Patrick Wisdom said of the short spring training. “So I like that aspect of it. I did think that by doing that, I felt like I was trying to play catch-up. Even though I prepared myself coming into spring training knowing it could be shorter.”
The playing catch-up Wisdom is describing might be part of what we are seeing. April is almost always a tough month for hitters, and having less time to prepare during spring training could just be making it tougher.
But the problem Bassitt is describing is a much more serious issue. The league can work around struggling offenses, and chances are that warmer weather will wake up the bats enough to placate fans and hitters. But if these new balls truly are putting batters in danger, then that is a problem that needs to be solved quickly.
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April 27, 2022 at 10:59PM
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Bad Baseballs: MLB Still Not Getting It Right - Forbes
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