The Braves are not having a good time, so let’s do a question that’s essentially a link dump. Or, well, a dump of one very specific link. The emphasis is on the word “effectively,” as we know MLB can and has attempted to tamper with the baseball based on its own information.
A couple of days ago, Bradford William Davis over at Eyeblack pulled together some information he was able to collect from league honcho Morgan Sword (great name, maybe not great… actions).
(The article linked above is free and not gated, you just have to enter an email, and there’s no email confirmation to click to gain access.)
Basically, though, the gist of the entirety of the article can be summarized in one partial sentence from Davis:
On October 17, 2019, current executive vice president Morgan Sword, instructed Rawlings executives to build and maintain a baseball capable of supporting what he called a “target leaguewide home run rate” …
There, that’s it. If you remember, 2019 was the year where ball go very far and there were lots of homers, and after that… less so. The ball has also entered kind of a weird pattern — 2022 was higher-drag, 2023 lower-drag, 2024-higher drag, 2025 had higher drag but the ball was bouncier, and 2026 is its own issue where first it looked more like 2024, then more like 2025, and the summer has seen a bunch of reporting about production issues and discolored baseballs that are being removed from consideration before they roll into play, all while drag readings have plummeted.
(There’s a dark story here. It’s really depressing. The Braves arguably changed their offensive approach in 2025 due to higher drag in 2024. This didn’t work, in part because of the increased bounciness of the 2025 ball(s). Then, in 2026, the Braves went back to pre-2025 stuff, until June, which is right when the returns to hitting a vaguely deep fly ball took off again.)
So, anyway, go read the article and opine about MLB’s effectiveness in attempting to shape the game towards some sort of aesthetic end here.
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