Atlanta Braves and the new “dead” baseball: who gets hurt most?
You might be surprised at which Atlanta Brave might be impacted the most from a ‘deader’ baseball in 2021.
And we thought “chicks dig the long ball”. The Atlanta Braves hit more homers than any major league team in 2020 except for the Dodgers: it was an offensive explosion not seen in decades for this franchise.
Yet for all that excitement and run-scoring, MLB seems determined to scale it all back this year: we might be heading for a new ‘dead ball era’… 21st century style.
From a report by Eno Sarris and Ken Rosenthal in TheAthletic on Monday (subscription required), an internal MLB memo sent to teams discusses changes to the baseball that are intended to make baseball fly shorter distances overall.
The changes are these:
- Balls with more consistent — and lower — Coefficients of Restitution (COR). In short, this means “less bouncy”.
- Being slightly less weighty (roughly 2.8 grams). This might actually counter the COR change somewhat, though the report suggests that it won’t fully do so.
- More humidors. More on that in a bit.
Here’s the bottom line — at least for now (emphasis added):
The MLB memo includes a footnote that says an independent lab found that fly balls that went over 375 feet lost one to two feet of batted ball distance with the new ball. That also sounds like no big deal, but every 3.3 feet of distance increases the likelihood of a home run by ten percent. An analyst familiar with the physics and math of this situation said the relationship was linear enough to estimate that this change will reduce home run rates by around five percent.
So a 20 homer hitter will instead hit just 19 over the course of a season? We could probably live with that… if those numbers are accurate. But that’s not necessarily the right way to read the numbers. We’ll discuss that in a bit, too.
About those humidors
Did you know that five teams were already using humidors for baseball storage? The Rockies… yep: we knew that. Turns out the same thing was happening with the Mariners, the Mets, Red Sox, and Diamondbacks.
Their fields ranked 11th, 13th, 6th, 14th, and 18th in home run park factors in 2020. That averages out to … roughly average. Sounds like MLB got the desired effect.
Of note, though: In the case of Arizona, the story in TheAthletic noted that homer rates fell by almost 20% after their humidor went online. Oy.
The reason for this is simple: a baseball that has a higher humidity level is going to retain some of that airborne humidity and will be slightly heavier… thus harder to drive with a bat. That change will be felt differently in different places.
So here’s the next problem: MLB did not (yet) tell us which five teams are the next on the list to get humidors.
We can speculate: the Reds, Phillies, Yankees all have relatively small fields and if the goal is to “even up” all of the parks, then theirs would all be good candidates to start with.
Other possible candidates would be in Toronto (or Buffalo?) and Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Field (White Sox).
You might also suspect Dodger Stadium, Petco Park, or Angel Stadium… except they have lots of homers simply because many of their hitters mash baseballs — dead or alive. Recent stats suggest the same for Atlanta Braves hitters.
Happily (for now), Truist Park does not appear to be a candidate, ranking 17th in home run park factors in 2020 at slightly harder-than-average.
Hopefully, the news will break soon about which fields are getting the new humidity spas for their baseballs.
But that now gets back to the question “who gets hurt most by a deadened ball?”
Atlanta Braves might be impacted
The Statcast numbers help us out here, as they identify home runs that are “No Doubters”, “Mostly Gone”, and “Doubters” (I prefer “Wall Scrapers”).
So guess which Atlanta Brave had the most “Doubters” in 2020? The homers that might have left the yard in only 7 stadiums or fewer?
Freddie Freeman. He supposedly had 11 such dingers in 2020 and 15 for the year (includes post-season).
Consider this: a livelier baseball might have been the difference between an average season for Freddie… and the MVP trophy.
In fact, it wasn’t even close: Ronald Acuna had the next-most with just six in that category (out of 15 total).
Marcel Ozuna? No problem: 3 wall-scrapers and 18 other blasts.
Heck, even Dansby Swanson had 4 close ones, but 9 that weren’t. Travis d’Arnaud had similar figures. Ozzie Albies hit 8 and only one of his was considered close.
Austin Riley: yeah… he hits no-doubters: only 1 was a wall-scraper.
I would expect that players with marginal power would be at risk with these new baseballs, and the expectation was that this would hurt hitters like Swanson and Albies the most.
That might still be true. If you expand the data back to 2019, we can see these results (includes post-season):
- Albies: 14 wall-scrapers out of 25
- Swanson: 10 out of 17
- Freeman: Just 8 out of 39 (could his COVID bout have influenced the 2020 numbers?)
It’s hard to evaluate things like baseball flight distances in laboratory-like conditions. The variables are myriad: temperature, wind, humidity, altitude, bat hardness, and simply the fact that replicating the impact angle of a round ball against a round bat is nearly impossible.
So it’s clearly good that the Atlanta Braves got Marcell Ozuna back for 2021. He’s a “no-doubter” homer guy for sure, and teams could be craving that kind of power by the time the trade deadline arrives.
Next. We need a bench!. dark
Maybe we’ll have to get used to a few more ringing doubles off the wall… or balls that fall as fly ball outs — sacrificed to the dreaded ‘Warning Track Power’ curse.