Atlanta Braves and the new “dead” baseball: who gets hurt most?

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.

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.