Computer study claims 1998 baseballs were juiced

[snopes]

A company that uses computer imaging claims baseballs had a larger rubberized core and a synthetic rubber ring in 1998, including the ball Mark McGwire hit for his 70th homer.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2719191

Does not suprise me a bit. I remember hearing about juiced balls back then. I can't find anything now, but I know someone had done some bounce tests on the balls & they were right up at the limit of what MLB deemed acceptable, and there was more bounce in them compared to older balls.

[LittleDuck]

I don't see the hubub, really, if all batters used the same balls. What difference does it make?

[Sara@home]

Originally Posted by LittleDuck

I don't see the hubub, really, if all batters used the same balls. What difference does it make?

If as alleged, the ball is used in certain years, you would expect more homeruns in those years.....and records being broken. Not fair to the people who set their records on unjuiced balls.

On "Around the Horn" today, Bill Plaschke said that players cut balls open and compare the insides "all the time". Regardless of what Rawlings and MLB say, obviously the insides of all the balls are not the same, Plaschke has seen it for himself.

[LittleDuck]

Originally Posted by Sara@home

On "Around the Horn" today, Bill Plaschke said that players cut balls open and compare the insides "all the time". Regardless of what Rawlings and MLB say, obviously the insides of all the balls are not the same, Plaschke has seen it for himself.

He also was pretty much rediculed (and I think lost points) for saying it, IIRC. The fact is, I doubt it gave any plpayer an edge if the balls were different because they would have been different across the league. They couldn't run out and tell the umpire to only use certain balls for certain players.

And, as someone else on ATH (or Pardon the Interruption...sometimes those two seem to blend for me) said, if this weretrue, the league would have focussed on that to try to direct attention from the other reason balls were flying that year

[Johnny Slick]

1. Plaschke is a moron.

2. This doesn't explain 2001.

[Sara@home]

Originally Posted by Johnny Slick

1. Plaschke is a moron.

That may be but it sort of irrelevant. You need to be claiming he's a liar to discount what he says he saw.

2. This doesn't explain 2001.

Find me an article that tells what years the balls they tested were from; maybe it does explain 2001 (along with performance-enhancing drug use by one of the best ballplayers ever). Or maybe they didn't test any balls from 2001, maybe the ones they tested weren't altered. But they are saying that clearly the one from 1998 -- specifically McGwuire's 70th homerun -- was. If, as Rawlings and MLB routinely claim, the balls are all the same and there are no changes from year to year, then all the balls should be the same. They aren't.

[ganzfeld]

I don't understand what the ball companies would have to gain by changing the balls for a short time. What's the motive? I guess you don't need a conspiracy theory just to show the facts of the case but the next logical question is: Why?

[Johnny Slick]

To make a broader point, juiced balls don't explain 1998 except to people who don't follow the game too much. The fact is, homeruns per game were high in '98 but this was not a sudden thing attributable to "lively balls" but a conflagration of a lot of different things, including:

- the rise in weight training among ballplayers
- The removal of boring 60s-70s era stadia and replacement of them with "retro" stadia that, apart from being much more fun to go to, tended to be smaller than the ones they replaced
- Coors Field (actually, major league baseball in Denver)
- Aluminum bats training college and high school pitchers to not go inside and as a result major league hitters camping out right against the plate and thus being better able to go with the pitch and hit it a long way
- Pitchers being increasingly unable to go inside on hitters due to a. being trained out of it in their formative years, b. being tossed out of games for throwing "purpose pitches", and c. pitching to guys wearing body armor, which serves to eliminate what Leonard Koppett described as a pitcher's primary tool: fear
- A switch in what kind of performance-enhancing drugs were used, from amphetamines to... "not steroids"

In addition, 1998 itself was an expansion year, which doesn't necessarily improve offense but does dilute everything a little bit, which in turn makes the records of the best players just a little bit better. It's no coincidence that Maris broke Ruth's record in '61, and not just because his team played 8 more games. Nobody had really come close to that mark before that year except for Hank Greenberg's 58 one year in the 1930s. For an even bigger effect, take a look at some of the batting averages in 1901, when major league baseball more or less expanded from 8 teams to 16.

In terms of raw homers/game though (which should probably be the gold standard for a potentially juiced ball, since everybody would be benefitting from it), the peak was '96. They dropped about 15% in 97-98, then flew back up again in 99 and continued the rise into 2001, when they hit their peak. They've fallen since then and are now basically back to the '98 levels. Since the report doesn't appear to be saying that the balls are currently juiced but that they were 8 years ago, I'd say that's a major strike against.

FWIW I do think that McGwire was probably doing steroids - his "supplement" of androstendione doesn't really do anything to a person who is already naturally producing as much testosterone as he can handle. When this little factoid came to light in '99, he protested a bit too long and hard for me, and I always thought it was awfully convenient that a reporter just happened to find a bottle of that stuff right about the time there were a flurry of "Is Mac Juiced?" articles. And don't get me started on "hey guys, I don't want to talk about the past". As for Sosa, I haven't seen any evidence of that. A corked bat I can buy, but people have been corking bats since at least Norm Cash in the early 60s and probably before that, so it's hard to call him a big fat cheater who should give up his cheatawards because of it.

Correlation isn't causation but it is a necessary component of it. I just don't see the correlation here.

[Johnny Slick]

Originally Posted by ganzfeld

I don't understand what the ball companies would have to gain by changing the balls for a short time. What's the motive? I guess you don't need a conspiracy theory just to show the facts of the case but the next logical question is: Why?

True. Plus, conspiracies are notably unwieldy. Somebody by now from baseball or from Rawlings would have come out and said "yep, we juiced 'em", the same way they came out and said "yep, we deadened 'em" during World War II (IIRC a key ingredient in the inside of the ball was removed because it was needed for jeep tires or something similar).

[Sara@home]

Originally Posted by ganzfeld

I don't understand what the ball companies would have to gain by changing the balls for a short time. What's the motive? I guess you don't need a conspiracy theory just to show the facts of the case but the next logical question is: Why?

It isn't a secret that baseball's popularity has been declining and the home run derby of 1998 brought back the fans. Juiced balls used at high profile times -- the All-Star game, it's homerun derby, playoffs, the World Series, games between the Yankees and Boston.....whatever -- might stimulate more interest in fans who are alleged to be notorious offense whores. After all, the biggest hit on baseball is (was?) that it's boring and there isn't enough scoring. Few people want to see a pitching duel anymore. Using the ball strategically intermittently would keep the records from ballooning but still enable excitement in specific games.

I suppose if MLB and Rawlings were willing to acknowledge and explain the differences found when people cut open balls and if those differences weren't to "juice" the ball, the juiced ball theories would end.

I have heard allegations of juiced balls being used my whole life......as much from players as from fans.

[Johnny Slick]

You've been hearing cries of juiced balls from people for a long time because it's the easy way out. Saying the ball is juiced is a far, far simpler argument than saying that hitters have learned to hit the opposite way and hitters work out a TON more than they did even in the 1970s. And again, this idea that they would introduce special balls at special times... that's the kind of conspiracy that would involve quite a few people: the umpires, the equipment specialists on each team whose job it is to provide teams with baseballs, the entire commissioner's office, both league presidents and their offices. It's simply too large and too unwieldy for there not to have been someone, somewhere sayng "hey, we're using lively balls here!" in a position of power.

The problem with saying that you could pick your spots in allowing the supposedly juiced balls is that guys like me would still be able to detect that. Baseball is a game of statistics. Is there *any* data that supports the idea that there are more HRs hit in the All-Star Game relative to the rest of the league than there used to be? In the playoffs? In Sox/Yankees games? I'll answer that for you. There is not. I imagine that thanks to the vagaries of random chance you can eventually find a particular matchup - Devil Rays vs. Nationals in Tuesday games played during the day, maybe - that shows more HRs per game than the era would suggest. That wouldn't, of course, actually prove anything though.

And in the case of Bill Plaschke, he probably knows this. No sportswriter can literally be as dumb as he is. He's just trying to sell papers by giving the people what they want, and in this case they want silly conspiracy theories.

[Johnny Slick]

One other thing. Two things, really:

a. Baseball is not currently declining in popularity, and
b. The explosion of homeruns did not coincide with the decline/rise anyway.

The game did decline - tremendously - in the 1950s and 1960s. Actually, that was also a time when offenses were going down. That being said, offense has been steadily going up since 1968. Popularity bottomed out in the late 70s, went through an unprecedented period of growth in the 80s to early 90s, tanked in '94 thanks to the strike, and has been recovering/growing ever since.

So unless you think the ball has been juiced ever since 1969, I'm not sure the "baseball was getting unpopular" argument works so well. Oh, and the big drop-off from the strike? The really big jump into the modern-day hitter's era began in 1993 and was in full swing in 1994. Processes were already going in motion when the game was at the height of its popularity. Nope, just don't buy the idea.

[Sara@home]

Now that you mention it, 1969 was exactly the year I first heard players making the claim the ball was juiced.

[Johnny Slick]

Originally Posted by Sara@home

Now that you mention it, 1969 was exactly the year I first heard players making the claim the ball was juiced.

Well, of course. That's because that was the year the balance started to move back towards the hitter after decades of moving in the pitcher's direction. Just because the guys were playing the game at the time doesn't mean they can't engage in post-hoc reasoning as well.

[ganzfeld]

Coincidentally, 1969 is also around the time we started hearing about juiced players!

[Sara@home]

They were juicing with speed in those days, not steriods.

[Sara@home]

Originally Posted by Johnny Slick

Well, of course. That's because that was the year the balance started to move back towards the hitter after decades of moving in the pitcher's direction. Just because the guys were playing the game at the time doesn't mean they can't engage in post-hoc reasoning as well.

Um, and it couldn't be that the move back towards the hitter was the result of a juiced ball?? You really lost me with that counter.

[Johnny Slick]

Originally Posted by Sara@home

Um, and it couldn't be that the move back towards the hitter was the result of a juiced ball?? You really lost me with that counter.

Baseball did a lot of different things in 1969, most of all lowering the pitcher's mound. That was also about the time they began to regulate the hitter's backgrounds, thanks to the player's union. Again, given the choice between obvious explanations that don't require a massive conspiracy and inobvious ones that do, I'll take the former, thanks.

[Sara@home]

Massive conspiracy?? Sort of an overstatement? The whole conspiracy is that Rawlings and MLB simply repeat the same statement over and over -- the balls are all the same and there are no changes.